In web browsing, URL stands for:

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Uniform Resource Locator. A URL is the address a browser uses to fetch a resource on the web: it says which protocol to use and where the resource sits. Both words matter — 'Uniform', the word fixed by the IETF standard (RFC 1738, 1994), and 'Locator', because it names the thing that locates the resource, not the place itself. A full URL reads scheme://host:port/path?query#fragment, e.g. https://www.example.com/notes/page?id=7.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) First word right, last word wrong. The standard expansion is 'Locator' — an agent noun for the string that does the locating. 'Location' is the commonest slip because it is the everyday English word.  (b) Both the first and the last word are wrong — neither 'Universal' nor 'Location' appears in the standardised expansion.  (d) The strongest trap. 'Universal' does have a historical footing — Tim Berners-Lee's early 1994 write-up was titled 'Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW' — but the term the IETF standardised, and the one exams accept, is 'Uniform'.

Concept: A URL is one kind of URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). A URI identifies a resource; a URL is a URI that also tells you how and where to get it, by naming the protocol (scheme) and the host. A URN (Uniform Resource Name) names a resource persistently without saying where it lives. When you type a URL, the browser hands the host part to DNS, which returns the IP address of the server, and then fetches the path over the scheme's protocol (usually HTTPS).

State PCS 2026 Q40 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q40 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer