URL vs Search in the ring tonight!
A recent column offered a website to download a malicious
software removal tool from Microsoft. A few folks commented that they were
unable to download the tool for a variety of reasons. The primary reason was
inaccurate typing of the
URL. (Universal Resource Locator or the www.abcde.com.)
Still another problem was that folks mistook search fields for address bars.
This poses all types of problems especially if our binary buddy is compromised.
What is the difference between the URL bar and a search
field? Open our favorite browser, doesn’t matter if it is Internet Explorer,
Chrome, Firefox or any other of the myriad of browsers available. For those
that swear they don’t have any of these, please open the program used to surf
the web. Look carefully at the top of the window, or if using the modern
version of Internet Explorer in Windows 8.1 the bottom of the window and find
the line that starts with http://. That is the URL and it resides in the Address
Bar. This line by default on most browsers performs two functions. If we type
in a correct and valid address such as courtnederveld.blogspot.com the
Universal Resource Locater will take us directly to that webpage. Miss type the
address and the browser will use our default search engine to display possible
websites that might be what we are looking for. If our browser has been
hijacked by malware, we might even raise an eyebrow over what appears on the
screen.
Many of us by choice or subterfuge have a toolbar that has a
search field just under the URL address bar or use a home page with a search
field built into it. Search means exactly that. We can type a correct website
address into a search field and it will not go to the site requested but will bring
up a list of sites that might be what we are looking for. In the column
referenced folks were typing the website address into a search field and not
the URL address bar resulting in a list of possible sites instead of going to
the site directly. To compound the problem, not all search engines return the
same results.
Example, the Xfinity homepage has a search field “Enhanced
by Google,” perform a search with that, then open a second tab go to google.com
and repeat the same search in the Google Search field to find that the Xfinity
search result differs from the Google results.
To ensure less biased search results, look at the default
search engine in our browsers. Internet Explorer-Options- Manage Add-ons then
click on search providers. Stick with the major ones such as Bing, Google,
Yahoo for example and eliminate any others. Chrome: go to Settings, Search –
Manage Search Engines and again stay with the major players. Other browsers
will have similar settings available.
Remember: URL it’s where I want to go, search means show me
all the possibilities.
