The well-known top-level domains are:
- .com: for boring commercial purposes
- .net: the edgy alternative to .com
- .org: all the fun websites are here
- .edu: owners of this website/e-mail are smarty-pants intellectuals
- .gov: indicates that the website is more reliable than Wikipedia. Also, if you receive an e-mail from a .gov TLD, you're in BIG TROUBLE.
- .mil: information from this TLD comes from our troops and you need to support it.
Some lesser used but still frequently seen TLDs:
- .fr: for locations and people in France
- .mx: for locations and people in Mexico
- .kr: for locations and people in South Korea
- .jp: for locations and people in Japan
- .uk: for locations and people in the UK
- .nu: for locations and people in Fangirltopia
- .fi: for nerds
- .biz: used solely for offering cheap Viagra
- .info: town dump (do not visit)
- .name: personal homepages of roughly three lucky people
- .cx: used solely for pictures of gaping anuses. AVOID.
There are also some secret TLDs that ICANN, being controlled by a couple of old-hand hackers who have never been mismanaged by overpaid stuffed suits, has tucked into the backbone, but only other hackers know about them, and you'll usually only see links to them on IRC or forums. The ones I've heard about are
- .ca: for locations and people in an imaginary country called "Canada" (yes, the country name kind of gives it away)
- .jew: for websites run by Jews (e.g., alfranken.jew, dailyshow.jew, cnn.jew)
- .borges: for locations and people in the mind of Jorge Luis Borges (examples: [email protected] or www.tlön.borges)
- .twilight_zone: an exclusive TLD used only by private websites, especially invite-only forums and cabals
- .bizarro: for locations and people on Bizarro World, where every statement is a lie. Google results from .bizarro are colored inversely to show they are lies. You can write awful things about people you know on .bizarro sites, but be careful-- if it turns out that something you wrote is true, you'll be sued for Bizarro Libel (49 USC §201). Interesting exception: wikipedia.bizarro is the same website as wikipedia.org. The edits on .bizarro, which are often misconstrued as "vandalism" by .org editors, are merely trying to correct what the .bizarro editors consider to be articles full of libelous truths.