By "Organization", we mean the organization through which the person has the computer account that was used for posting to Usenet. This might be the person's place of employment, their school, or their commercial Internet service provider.
For an organization name to be useful in searching, it has to exactly match one of the organization names used by the server, which are all based on Internet domain names. Here are some examples and other instructions to help you select the name.
In many cases, the correct name is the one used to refer to the organization informally. This may be a single distinguishing part of the organization's full name, or a set of initials. Examples of educational sites are:
More technical explanation: the correct value for Organization is always the second-to-last or third-to-last component of the domain name. (Here, component is used to mean one of the substrings of the domain name that are separated by the '.' character.) The second-to-last component is always used in the U.S.A. If you don't know the correct domain name, you may be able to look it up using the InterNIC whois service. Outside the U.S.A., the third-to-last component is frequently used, especially when the second-to-last component is "edu", "ac", "com", or "co".
Note that, as defined here, organization names are not unique. For example, "cdc" corresponds to the Center for Disease Control (cdc.gov), Chattanooga Data Connection Inc. (cdc.net), Citizens Democracy Corp. (cdc.org), and Control Data Systems, Inc. (cdc.com). Thus, a search with Organization set to cdc could return e-mail addresses from any of these three. In many situations, though, this feature can be useful, as in the case of Internet service companies that have the corresponding domain names ending in both ".com" and ".net" (e.g., mci.com and mci.net).
Please report problems to webmaster@usenet-addresses.mit.edu