Evaluate Before You Even See the Page: Read the URL First Continued

3) Is it a personal web page? 

Remember that anybody can put anything on the Web.  Most users who pay a monthly service with an Internet Service Provider such as Comcast or Earthlink are usually provided megabytes of online storage to post web pages or other online documents if they so desire.  At most four year higher education institutions many students also have space to post web pages as well.  And there are all sorts of hosting services (free or not) that people can use to post web pages.  Fortunately, there is a way to recognize some of them, right from the URL.

http://www.berkeley.edu/~pbailey/stemcellresearch.html

The domain lets us know it is from an educational institution, and the name clues us in that we are looking at a page from UC Berkeley, a research, four year, and graduate school institution.  But further down the address, what is listed is first a username, but second of all a tilde (~) right before it.  The tilde with username is letting us know that what we viewing a personal web page, most likely a student's.  Given that, we could be looking at a personal web page, or maybe a student project (that could be an "A" student project or an "F" student project).

http://members.tripod.com/abortionfacts.htm

In this example, Tripod is a free web host service that only carries personal web pages.  Other such services include geocities.  Another giveaway are portions of the address that use terms such as "members" or "homepages"

http://home.earthlink.net/viewsongaymarriage/

Earthlink provides up to 5 MB of online space to each of its subscribers.  That's a lot of personal web pages out there on the Web if you even consider that just a small portion of subscribers go ahead and post pages they have created.  This example also has "home" as the name of the server, signaling a server of Earthlink's that features home pages of its subscribers (i.e. personal pages).