Well first of all, when I say address I mean their URL, (uniform resource locator.) Then again I've always told people that URL is just a fancy technical word that really just means web address. The contents within the quotes is the URL of Questy's Learning Center: "www.questy.com/learn"
You may be here at this learning site because told you to visit "www.questy.com/zen" or "www.computerguru.net/learn" The complete address is the URL. Dont confuse this with domain name.

All those names, the "dot.com's" are domain names. In the above examples the domain names are "questy.net" and "computerguru.net" ".com" , ".net" and ".org" are call upper level domains.
".com" was meant to mean commercial, ".net" was meant to mean network, and ".org" was meant to mean organization. When someone talks of an "organization" you may first think of that in terms of non profit organization. While that may have been the intent of the domains ".org", however in actual practice, anyone can fill out the forms and sign up for a ".com" , ".net" or ".org" name.

There are some "special" domain names that you can't just sign up and acquire, for instance ".gov" is for government entities, or ".mil" for military web sites, or ".edu" for colleges and universities.

If you understand how domain names work you could guess a name.
For instance if you were shopping for a car you could type in www.ford.com, and that would take you to Ford Motor Company's web site.
If you were shopping for a college, "www.udel.edu" would take you to the University of Delaware's web site.

There are also 2 letter country codes, for instance if you see a site that is an official web site of some subdivision of the United States, that web site would end in ".us" or a Canadian site is one that ends in ".ca"

Everywhere around you technology and the web are creeping up on you. Radio stations are giving you their URL on the air while you are listing to them. TV networks are asking you to visit their web site while you view their programming. Cereal boxes and soft drink cans ask you to visit their web sites by listing their URL's on their packaging.

So if you understand how naming systems work, you could guess names all night long, and hit upon quite a few addresses of sites. You could also start keeping track of all the web sites you see and hear through the day. While this alone could give you quite a bit to see and do on the web, the joy of the web is in crusing, and the power of the web is in searching. So that leads us to our next topic ....

What's the difference between directories versus search engines, and why should you care?