ENV* K105

ENV* K105 Internet Assignment  (Home)
Evaluating Websites:

You can find websites using search engines such as Google (http://www.google.com) or All the Web (http://www.alltheweb.com/). Google is fast and thorough.  It is the one I use most often nowadays.  I used to like Infoseek (http://infoseek.go.com) because it allowed you to search within a set of search results.  It also suggested closely related searches that might be useful. But it's become an ad factory.

I wrote a brief lesson on search engines, which you can see at http://environmentalet.org/searching.htm, but it's getting a bit old. Check out the Internet info (http://library.albany.edu/internet/searchnet.html) from the University at Albany Libraries.

Websites are hard to evaluate.  It's easy to confuse form and substances (ie, if a site looks good, we tend to believe the stuff that's there).

Ask the following questions about any site you are viewing:

• Who is responsible for the site?
• Are they selling something? (Either a product or a political message.)
• When was it last updated?
• What is the upper level domain name (blahblah.com, .edu, .org, etc)?  A commercial site may be selling something; an organization may have an agenda.
• Does the address have a piece like "~benoit"?  If so it usually means that the page belongs to an individual person.
• Is there an email address for asking questions about the information in the site?
• How objective is the author(s)?  Does the site just present information or is the author or owner of the site advocating for a policy or point of view?
• Is the source of the information on the site clearly given?  Is there any way to check on the information?
• Is the author trying to prove a point, sell a product, entertain, or provide information?

Some links for more tips on evaluating websites:

• http://www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/research/webeval.html Criteria and tools from the Cornell University Library
• http://library.usm.maine.edu/research/researchguides/webevaluating.html Checklist for evaluating websites, links to more resources
• http://www.quick.org.uk/menu.htm Good information presented in more of an elementary school format

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