You can often find a site’s URL by searching the web or newsgroups. Sometimes you hear about a site in conversation but don’t know the URL, and would like to be able to find it. The following tips can help:
- Search engines. Try the techniques described in the search section to search for the site with two or three different search engines. In particular, try searching for some piece of unique information about the site. If you know a unique name associated with the site, or even a part of the URL, you can often use that hook to surface the site from the virtual ocean.
- Newsgroups. If the site is very new, it may not yet be indexed by the search sites. However, if a site has any notoriety it will usually have been discussed in the newsgroups, and you can often find it by searching Usenet newsgroups. Limiting the search to a date range of the past few days is often effective when the site has recently been of interest in the news — several people somewhere on the planet have almost certainly posted messages about it.