Landing on the wrong site in Internet research can sometimes still be useful if you backtrack the URL. It's the gold miner's strategy: when you find nuggets in the creek, work your way upstream to find the mother lode. In this case, that will be the page with a table of contents or a list of topics for the whole site. If the Web page you landed on is at all related to the subject you're seeking, you might get lucky.
How do you backtrack a URL? First, you need to know what all the parts mean. A URL is just a huge, multilevel index. Here's the URL for Austin Writer Bruce Sterling, http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/bruce2.htm
HTTP:// - Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This tells your computer the way (protocol) that information will be
transferred (in this case, the hypertext protocol ).
WWW - World Wide Web. Tells your browser that this is a Web page.
WELL.COM – The company that stores his site.
MIRROSHADES – A part of the Well dedicated to SF.
BRUCE2.HTM --The name of the site itself. This is the index or contents page, the thing you're looking for.
How does backtracking a URL help you? Suppose you were searching for Internet terminology and found this site:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/guides/glossary
You see an alphabetical list of Internet jargon divided into the sections A-F, G-P, and Q-Z. But what sort of weird site is this? What's a Webmonkey? Is there anything else useful here? Place your cursor in the address line at the end of the last word, "glossary," and press Backspace until you've deleted the letters "/glossary", leaving the rest of the URL intact. Press Enter, and you'll go up one level and see the guides list for Webmonkey. Use the same procedure to delete "/guides" and press Enter again. Now you're at the main Webmonkey contents page. There's a lot of useful Internet information here, including tutorials for HTML and more. Delete "/webmonkey" and you'll move up to the Hotwired home page. That's as far back as you can trace this particular address, but you've discovered a useful source of Internet information in the process.
So what is Webmonkey? Wired magazine has created several Internet sites, each with its own specialty. HotWired and Webmonkey are two of them. Webmonkey's specialty is Internet education and it can be a good place to learn more about the Internet. Why does it look the way it does? Wired magazine's target audience is the young computer crowd.
Occasionally you'll find a URL that you can't open by backtracking. In that case, go directly to the top level in the URL by deleting all the words after the first single slash (/), then follow the links that take you down the URL. For example, chopping http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/guides/glossary down to http://hotwired.lycos.com/ and pressing Enter will take you directly to the HotWired home page. You can then choose the Webmonkey option and work down the levels.
Notice the word "com" in the URLs above. That's a domain suffix, in this case meaning commercial or business. Three-letter suffixes identify the type of site while two-letter suffixes are the country of origin, such as uk for the United Kingdom or fj for Fiji. Besides com, other standard U. S. suffix types are: edu (university), gov (U.S. government), and org (organization). The Internet domain system is currently undergoing a major overhaul and new domain types are being added, but you'll mostly see the old suffixes for a long time yet.
Domain names provide clues as to what you might find at a site. Sites with the edu or gov suffixes may have lots of free material. A site with the cn suffix (China), is probably going to be in Chinese, whereas one with the hk (Hong Kong) suffix will almost certainly be in both Chinese and English. You can find lists of the hundreds of possible Internet domain suffixes at several sites (for example, http://www.currents.net/resources/dictionary/domains.html), but, once you learn the most common twenty or so, you'll only need to check the list for the unusual ones.