Due to the vast amount of information arriving on the World Wide Web daily, it is necessary for researchers to apply the same critical thinking skills to searching the Internet as they would apply to written resources.

Information may be used to deceive, to sway, to sell and to hurt. Your responsibility is to detect such practices and handle them appropriately as you conduct your research. By applying critical thinking skills, you can avoid being lead astray by biased, false, or misleading information.

Information located on the Internet is unmonitored. The creation of a homepage and the information found there can be done by anyone. Since there is no governing body overseeing the indexing and/or abstracting material found on the Internet, it is difficult to judge the quality of the information.

The chart below provides a process whereby the researcher may evaluate the information found on the Internet. An additional checklist is also available from the Library Information Kiosks, from the Information Literacy Coordinator, or is available for printing online at http://www.usd.edu/library/instruction/Checklist-WWW.htm

Further assistance is available from the Reference Desk.

Useful information on evaluation of Web Resources

Evaluating Information Found on the Internet - http://milton.mse.jhu.edu:8001/research/education/net.html

Evaluating Quality on the Web (Hope Tillman) - http://www.tiac.net/users/hope/findqual.html

How to Search the Web: A Guide to Search Tools - http://daphne.palomar.edu/TGSEARCH/

Tips for Evaluating a World Wide Web Search - http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/hss/ref/tips.html

Evaluation Process

Some facts

• There are more than 2,500 search services (search engines, directories, etc.) on the Internet
• 7 million new pages go up everyday
• Only about 16% of the information on the Internet is accessed by search engines
• The average life span of a URL is 44 days

Web Publications

Types of Search Services

Directories - (Yahoo, Infomine, Argus Clearinghouse, etc.) Selection criteria vary from service to service; has a tendency to use dated information, not taking into account new resources (pages may no longer exist or have moved).

Free Databases - (Grateful Med, NASA, etc.) Access is sometimes difficult without knowing the URL; many government sites maintain useful, free databases.

Meta-search Engines - (MetaFind, Profusion, Dogpile, etc.) will search multiple individual search engines at once.

Natural Language Search Engine - (Ask Jeeves, etc.) will search using natural language including statements or questions.

Search Engines - (AltaVista,  Google, etc.) use spiders, crawlers, and bots to seek out pages; selection criteria is not evaluative; in some cases selection is dependent upon accessibility of a particular server; distinguished types of information by file extension only; retrieves records from its own archives (pages may no exist on Web any longer).

Specialized (subscription) Databases - (Lexis-Nexis, UMI Proquest, ERIC, etc.) fee-based databases covering general and specialized fields; reviewed, selected, and published like books and periodicals.

Criteria for Evaluation

Following are the main areas of a Web site (page) that need examination. Are these questions answerable? If not, maybe you should rethink your use of this resource for research purposes.

Trustworthy Guides/Directories

• Digital Librarian: http://www.digital-librarian.com

• Infomine: http://infomine.ucr.edu

• ML's Web Search Index: http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~marylynn/websearch.html