The URL or address bar is located at the top of all browsers. It is where you type in the address of any web site that you wish to visit. See the image at the bottom of this page.
I have noticed, when people call into HARD DRIVE’s help desk, there is a confusion between the address bar and search engine. So here is a little review of the differences.
Internet Explorer (IE), Mozilla (Fire Fox), Chrome, Safari, and Opera are the major browsers that most people use. These browsers are all free and fight for dominance. I have tried to list them in order of popularity. IE is bundled with the Windows operating systems (OS), Safari is the Apple OS Browser and Chrome is bundled with Google’s new Chrome Books. All of the others are independent of a specific OS, but all browsers will work with in all Operating systems.
Now days all browsers are bundled with a search engine component that you can set with your search engine of choice. Some search engines are: Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc… There are approximately 30 major search engines , but there are probably hundreds that are designed to be topic specific searching for Medical, sports or blogs just to name a few topics and inside of these choices there can be other search engines that get more specific for instance under; sports-baseball-statistics.
The method of entering data into the address bars is this. If you are just browsing in general for a specific site and you are not directed to, it is not necessary to type in:
http, https, or www.
In order to go to a specific site you must include with the domain name:
.com, .net, .org, .co, .me, etc…
after the specific and accurate name of the site.
The specific domain name of HARD DRIVE is “harddrive321.com”. If you enter harddrive321 the search engine of your web browser will bring up a list of potential web sites just as if your were using the search engine directly but will not go to that specific site you are trying to reach. If you are trying to go to a .net site but enter .com instead you will not reach the site you are looking for. As of June 2011 there were 346,004,403 websites on the internet.
In my current favorite browser, Chrome, if I enter harddrive321, it returns this:
If I enter the correct name of the web site harddrive321.com, I surf to the specific web site and end up on the Home Page.
If your web browser will act like a search engine, why surf to a search engine at all?
Different search engines bring up different information. Depending on the information you are looking for depends on what engine you would want to use. The specific subject of search engines will be covered in a different article on this site in the near future.
The image below is of Internet Explorer 9 also called IE9.
