Hi Gail,
Can you clarify what you mean by "go to the url" ? Are you trying to get the text from page or do you want to load the url in a web browser?
For the second part, you can use Select Layer By Attribute—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop and then use zoomToSelectedFeatures. Below is a sample for ArcMap:
mxd = arcpy.mapping.MapDocument('/path/to/mxd')
df = arcpy.mapping.ListDataFrames(mxd, "Layers") [0]
lyr = arcpy.mapping.ListLayers(mxd, "Target_Layer", df)[0]
arcpy.SelectLayerByAttribute_management(lyr, "NEW_SELECTION", ' "id" = 1234 ')
df.zoomToSelectedFeatures()
Hope this helps,
Earl