By now, you are probably familiar with what a URL is.

You can learn something about the type of organization and the country from which the web page you're viewing comes by taking a look at the "host computer address" section of a URL (the part between the "http://" and the next "/").

For example, host computer addresses ending in .edu are from educational institutions, and those ending in .gov are from government sites. (Note: This does not necessarily mean that the web page you are viewing is an official page of the educational institution or government agency. It might simply be the personal web page of a student or employee of the institution.) See the table below for more of these top-level "domain" indicators:

Personal Web Pages

The special character ~ before some part of the URL usually indicates that you are looking at a person's home page or personal pages which might not represent the official point of view of the organization or institution on whose host computer the pages are stored. For example:

http://www.santarosa.edu/~jsmith

URLs for web pages outside the United States and for some sites within the United States (schools, public libraries, etc...) end with a two-letter code indicating the country where the web page originates. For example, the URL for the French National Library,  http://www.bnf.fr ,   ends in   ".fr"  for France. Here's a tool which will help you determine the country of origin for a particular web page.

In the United States, official web pages of city governments often follow the format: www.ci. to indicate that the website is for a city, then the name or abbreviation for the city name, then a two-letter code for the state, followed by the two-letter country code. For example: