In my post on June 25, 2019 – www What? – I talked about searching and the number which is sometimes added after the www. Today, I want to share what you should look for BEFORE you click a search result. Let’s look at the first seven search results from a query I made entitled “HP Printer Drivers.” Pay close attention to the actual domain in the address – I’ve highlighted it in yellow.
If you looked closely, only the first two search result URLs (web addresses) had anything to do with HP. What this means is that the other sites are not really the manufacturer and going there to download drivers for your HP printer could be very dangerous. (Just for the record, you should never download printer drivers from any site except the manufacturer’s. If they don’t have a driver, it doesn’t exist.) You might also have noticed that the last two in the search results were advertisements. Note the word “Ad” at the beginning of the line right under the URL.
The unfortunate truth is that most of us, myself included, are always in a hurry. We perform an Internet search, think we see what we want/need and we click. Sometimes that fast leaping-before-looking can get us into trouble.
You should always look carefully at the URL’s domain in any search result before you click.
Call To Action: Next time you perform an Internet search, look at the URL of each of the search results and notice what they are.
