No value was set for the promotional messages.

It took nine months of negotiations, but Brookstone Inc., the New Hampshire-based retailer of unusual tools and household widgets, has won control of a coveted Internet address. The price for www.brookstone.com was an unspecified amount of free on-line advertising, which Brookstone will provide the golf-course management company that held rights to that address as part of its operations at a Georgia country club. No value was set for the promotional messages. But whatever it turns out to be, said Jonathan Linden, a Brookstone lawyer, "it is not $3.3 million." That is what Compaq Computer Corp. acknowledges it paid last year for www.altavista.com, the address World Wide Web surfers type into their browsers to gain access to Compaq_s highly rated AltaVista search engine.