The Power of the URL

You probably have at least the slightest idea of what a URL is. It’s also called the “address”, but “URL” is the more proper term because it’s more precise. (“Address” can mean street address, e-mail address, URL, or other things; “URL” just means URL.) For example, this page’s URL is .

Most of the time, you never even worry about the URL except when you type in, say, www.google.com to access Google. But there are times when it could be useful. For example, if you hack off the “/urls” bit and press Enter, you’ll go “up one level” to my essays page. (It’s called “going up a level” because the URL is like an upside-down tree, with the top level, or “root”, being the domain name and the rest “branching out” from there.) My essays page is easy to find on this website, but there are some places where it’s not so easy to go up one level and it’s easier to just do it yourself. Ideally, that shouldn’t happen, but now you know what to do when it does.

This won’t always work. For example, if a page is named http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/something.pl, the cgi-bin part isn’t going to contain anything useful. (What’s a cgi-bin, you ask? It’s the place where the website keeps programs it needs to run. It’s a geeky thing that you don’t need to worry about.) If you try going there anyway, you’ll probably get a “403 Forbidden” message, which is the web’s way of saying “That file exists, but you can’t see it.” In that case, just hit your browser’s “Back” button and try something else.

Sometimes URLs follow regular patterns. For example, if I want to look George Carlin up on Wikipedia, I don’t go to Wikipedia and type in “George Carlin”. I ask for the most direct URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Carlin. This is possible because Wikipedia uses an easy and consistent format for its URLs. Even if the URL isn’t exactly right, I can often easily get to what I’m looking for.

Be warned that some places don’t use easy-to-understand URLs. They use really ugly ones like http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/xyzzy.pl?article=123456&session=31337, which doesn’t give you the slightest clue about the structure of the website. In such cases, you’re probably better off not even worrying about the URL and just using the site’s navigation.

These “URL tricks” do work a fair amount of the time. When they do, they can save you time and effort. That’s the way a lot of “technical” things are: once you understand them, you can use them to your advantage.

Page last modified: Jan 01, 1970 00:00:00 (GMT) [?]