An Internet top-level domain assigned to a country. A country code is a two-letter suffix such as .us (United States), .ca (Canada) and .de (Germany). For a list of codes, see
country codes A-E,
country codes F-M and
country codes N-Z. For a list of all top-level domains, see
Internet domain name. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu found a unique way to profit from its country code (see
.tv).
Computers read Internet addresses from right to left. Thus, on encountering
sven@univ.oslo.net.se, the message would first be sent to Sweden, since .se is the country code for Sweden. Swedish routers would then send the message to
univ.oslo.net where it will be waiting for Sven the next time he signs on.
Country Codes in Search Engines
Google and Yahoo have language selection boxes for narrowing searches to particular countries; however, other search engines let you specify the country code. For example, to find websites in France about wine using the AltaVista search engine (www.altavista.com), one could type
+wine +domain:fr. To do the same in Go (www.go.com), one would type
+wine +site:fr.