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.

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