Determining the Source of Web Pages When viewing a web page, it may be useful to determine who controls the web content and the web server.

The URL of every web page is displayed at the top of your web browser. Get into the habit of always reading the URL first before looking at the web page.  Often times you have arrived at a web page via a search result or another hyperlink. You may be several levels "deep" in a particular web site. Study the URL and determine what kind of web server the page is hosted within. For example, delete the latter half of the URL and visit the main page at "computer.domain.name"

• If "company.domain.name" looks to be a social media site, then the specific web page you were viewing probably belongs to a user of that service. At this point, your focus is strictly on the individual user. Go back to the URL and see of there is a logical breaking point in the URL. For example:
  http://company.domain.name/pathname/filename.ext can be shortened to
  http://company.domain.name/pathname If Pathname is a User_ID_NAME , then this approach should bring you to the home page for that users' directory.
• If "company.domain.name" is a specific organization that you want to learn more about, then proceed to the next steps.

All Domain names on the Internet are registered with "Domain name registrars". Domain name registrars are organizations which have been authorized to register names for a specific subset of domain names. Most domain name registrars provide a "whois" function, where you can search for the owner of a domain name. See my WHOIS Overview.

Knowing who owns the domain may not satisfy your curiosity. You may also be interested in where is the Web server located, and how is it connected to the Internet. There is a network utility called traceroute which is often used to trouble shoot network connections. There are many websites that will allow you to originate a traceroute from their location to any other location that you specify. See my Traceroute Overview.  A web server does NOT have to be hosted at an organization's location, but may be hosted with a web hosting company.

Some webpages include point of contact information. You could also examine the HTML Source code of the web pages - Some web authoring programs include the author's name within meta_tags which are included near the beginning of a web page. 

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