Article by Worth Godwin Computer Training
Here is a simple thing to learn but is a big time saver you really need to know about when using the Internet.
I see many rookie, and even experienced computer users making this blunder (and remember, I’m not being critical; it’s not your fault if you’re making this computer mistake)
Don’t use a search engine like Google or Bing to search for web pages or web sites if you already know the address!
Search engines are like phone books. When do you use a phone book? You use it to look up a number if you don’t know it, right?
You don’t use a phone book when you already know the number, because that would be a waste of time and wouldn’t make sense, right?
But that’s exactly the mistake I’ve seen people making again and again over the many years I’ve helped people with their computers.
So for example, in my computer newsletter I may send out a link to a lesson on my site. Now normally you should be able to click on, but sometimes email programs will “break” the link so clicking it doesn’t work.
So what some people do is they try typing the address of the link into a search engine, and end up not being able to find the page!
That’s because the page in the example is for my subscribers only, and so is an “unlisted number” (so to speak) which isn’t listed in Google or any other search engines, just like an unlisted number isn’t found in the phone book.
Make sense?
So how do you “directly dial the number” of a web page you know?
Simple. In your web browser window (a web browser is the program you use to look at web pages, such as Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, or Internet Explorer) at the top of the window you should normally see a bar with the address of the website you are currently viewing.
So if you are on Amazon you’d see
or if you’re using Google you’d see:
etc. In most cases you’d actually see something longer, but it will always begin with the “domain name” of the website.
That bar where you see the address of the site is called the location bar, or the address bar.
All you need to do to go to a website you know the address of, whether it’s a public page a private page, is to click ONCE on the address you see in that bar and typically this will “highlight” that address.
You can then either hit the delete or backspace key on your keyboard to clear it, or usually you can simply start typing and everything that is highlighted in blue will be replaced by what you’re typing.
So if you wanted to go to Facebook, you could type
into that address bar and press Enter or Return on your keyboard and it would take you directly there.
You could also just type
facebook.com
and that would work too because the first part is almost always optional.
This is much better than *searching* for an address, finding it in the search results (or maybe not even finding it at all). Then clicking the link in the search results to get there, when you could just dial direct.
Even if it’s a public page that is listed, at the very least you’ve wasted time and effort searching for something you don’t need to search for, because you already know where it is.
Again, this is like using a phone book to look up a number you already know — and if it’s a private, unlisted web page, like the ones I share with my newsletter, it won’t even turn up.
Personally, the only time I type the address of a website into a search engine and search for it is when I’m trying to learn more *about* the site, rather than searching to get there.
So learn this basic computer tip:
If you know an address, just type it into the address bar at the top of your web browser window and press the enter key on your keyboard.
Do not search for it as you are at best wasting time and effort, and at worst will not get where you’re trying to go.
I hope that helps.
About the Author
Worth Godwin is a computer coach with over 15 years’ experience helping computer users of all levels, and has also worked for many years “in the trenches” as a hardware and software tech, solving real-world computer problems.
Worth has also been studying the human mind, and how people learn, since the early 1990s. He draws upon all of this experience, as well as his English and writing degrees, to teach people in a unique way with explanations that really make sense.
In 2006, Worth began recording audio and video computer training, designed to make it easy to learn computers at your own pace, for an affordable price, with a system that really works.