SECTION 2: STRATEGIES FOR LOCATING RELIABLE HIV/AIDS INFORMATION ON THE WEB

FINDING GOVERNMENT AGENCY WEB SITES: .gov

You may know of a local, state, or federal government agency, but you might NOT know its URL or address on the Web. (URLs were described, dissected, and discussed in Section 1.)

Federal government agency Web site always end in the .gov domain:
http://www.agency.gov

Because most government agencies have long names, the acronym or initials are used in the URL:

Centers for Disease Control -- CDC	http://www.cdc.gov
National Institutes of Health -- NIH	http://www.nih.gov
Food and Drug Administration -- FDA	http://www.fda.gov

To find a government agency Web site, try typing the acronym.gov into the address bar of your Web browser.

If that does not take you to the correct site, you can then go to your favorite search engine, and do a phrase search for the name of the government agency. The agency name should appear near the top of the search engine results list. (Details about using search engines are covered in Section 3 of this tutorial.)

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