“Darn!” you think to yourself. “If only I knew what the website address was!”

This happens millions of times per day, and it happens to millions of different people. You know that a website exists for a particular company or product, but you don’t know the URL. What’s a URL you ask? URL is an acronym that stands for Uniform Resource Locator (Impress your friends!). In non geek-speak, a URL is simply the address of a webpage on the World Wide Web. An example of a URL would be:

www.pcauthority.ca

Thats the PC Authority Inc. website address, also known as the URL. The problem arises when a particular website address is different to what people “think” it should be. Lets use the popular Japanese car manufacturer “Nissan” as an example. You would assume their website address (aka. URL) would be the following:

www.nissan.com

Interestingly enough, that is incorrect and will not take you to the car manufacturer Nissan. In actuality, the correct website is the following:

www.nissanusa.com

You ask “How the heck would you guess that!?” Well, the answer is simple. You don’t have to guess. Just use a search engine!

By typing “nissan” into a search engine such as Google (www.google.com), you will instantly be provided a Hyper Link which will take you to the Nissan website. A hyper link, simply known as just a link, is a portal between two webpages. If you click on a link, you will jump to another page.

Once you submit your search keyword to a search engine, pay close attention to the results. There may be many ambiguous results, and it is your job to choose the link that will take you to the actual website you are looking for. Google is quite famous because 9/10 it will return the website your were looking for at the very top of the page; almost like it can read your mind! Nontheless, read the summaries of the results to decide which link is the authentic one; it will usually be near the top.

So if you don’t know the website address, don’t panic! Just type in the company / product name into a search engine and voila! You’ve got your website. At this point, you probably want to “bookmark” the website for convenience in the future. But thats a whole other topic… Perhaps I can write about that tomorrow…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.