First, what composes an URL? The following is an URL (Uniform Resource Locator) pointing to a page on the World Wide Web, just as a card catalog in a library has a call number to a book in the stacks -- "http://www.mindspring.com/Pub/infor/help.html".

1. The "http://"informs servers and browsers -- Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer -- that the file being downloaded to a computer is a "HyperText Transfer Protocol" file. This is the default for almost all browsers and can be omitted in some cases.

2. The "www."tells the servers and browsers to use a particular file server computer to handle this request. Some servers have multiple computers interacting with each other. All the requests with "www." are sent to this file server computer. The default is this computer. To illustrate these first two points, I could type into "Location" either "cnn.com" or "http://www.cnn.com/". I use the defaults with Netscape Navigator.

3. The "mindspring.com" is the host or host server. The host can supply many clients with different addresses and more hosts. For example, "http://mindspring.com/~kkbooks/abc/home.htm" and "southernchristian.edu/" are located on the "mindspring.com"file serving computer. In a few lessons, we will look at searching by host.

4. The last part of the host name -- "com" is the domain or area of the world with its own domain name, i.e., "de" for Germany, "fr" for France. The United States has a number of domain names, i.e., "com, mil, gov, org, net, tm, (state initials + .us) to name a few. All the above can be written in captial or lower case letter. A general rule is always use lower case letters.

5. The following "/Pub/infor/" are directories or favorites where the file server computer has been divided up into a large number, for example, mailboxes, and even some of those mail boxes have been divided up. In our illustration, capitalized letters must be capitalized and small letter must be small letters. On some file servers it does not make a difference, but other it does ! ! !

6. Last comes the web page -- "help.html". On older operating systems only allowed for three letter extensions, hence "htm". If the web page portion is left off, most file server computers look for "initial.html" or "home.htm" or "html" in both cases. No wonder most people refer to it as the -- home page.

By going to AltaVista advance search we can enter "eddie" as well as the URL search and found all the pages in Twickenham with the word "eddie" on them.