CYBERWISE: Become a Net detective.

Find the Website you need--even without the URL 

Like a library, the Internet is a vast repository of information on all manner of subjects, indexed for your retrieval. Unfortunately, you don't always have enough information to find the site you need. An incomplete or incorrect URL can leave you lost in an abyss of unsuitable sites. For an Internet sleuth, finding missing information comes with the territory. Listed below are some common pitfalls and the clues that will help solve some of the toughest Website mysteries.

* If you've explored the Net at all, chances are you've searched for a site that you know exists but won't show up when you type the company's name into a search engine. Key words describing the business often bring up too many hits, and the companies listed are similar enough that it's difficult to narrow the search. If it's after business hours and there's no Web address on the company's phone message, don't despair. Try entering the company's area code and phone number into a search engine and you may be surprised at the results. A phone number is a unique identifier that immediately narrows the field and increases the likelihood that you'll get a match.

* Got a Website that's just been advertised in the newspaper or included in a brochure but you can't access it? If the URL has just been announced and you get a blank screen, the site owners probably haven't planned adequately for high traffic and didn't format the site so you can see text before large graphics load. Other errors may mean the server went down under the stampede. But it's also very likely that there was an error in the URL. If you have an address that reads http:\\www.joes volcanoes.com, you've found the problem. Web addresses have forward slashes, not backslashes. The URL http://www.joesvolcanoes.com would be correct if the site existed.

* Ever received an e-mail that contains a Web address as a hot link? Before you click on the link, make sure it's from a trusted source. OK--it's a URL you want to visit, and you might even get a special deal by following the exact link given, but you get an error message. First, check to see whether the URL is at the end of a sentence and the period at the end accidentally became part of the link. Commas and parentheses can be a problem, too. Just copy and paste the URL--without the extraneous punctuation--into your browser.

You might have similar problems with Web addresses that are too long for a single line in the e-mail program's window. Those long URLs are common to special-offer pages, and they can get broken off at the end of the line and passed to the Web browser incomplete. Copy and paste them by hand.

* Want to call a business that didn't have the foresight to include the phone number on their site and the phone directory has proved equally useless? Assuming the Website has its own domain name, such as www.backaches.com, you can get some information through the InterNIC, the entity that governs domain names. Go to (http://proweb site. com/whois.html) and see the field marked "Enter Your Domain Name Here." Type in only the domain name, such as "backaches.com," then hit the OK button. A page of information from the InterNIC will come up with the owner of the domain, phone numbers for an administrative contact, a technical contact and a billing contact.

For European Web addresses, use the RIPE Network Coordination Centre at (www.ripe.net/db/whois.html); Military: (http://whois.nie.mil); U.S. Government: (http://whois.nic.gov); Asia Pacific: (http://whois.apnic.net); American Registry for Internet Numbers (http://whois.arin.net).

* You want to find an image, but don't know the filename? Guess--and keep the key words short enough to cover several possible word forms. For example, if you want a picture of sea monkeys, typing "seamonkey.gif" into Alta Vista might get you nothing, but typing "seamonk*.gif" gets results.

Now you're hot on the trail, so don't give up until you find what you're after!