Section 9 - Locating and Evaluating
Information on the Internet
Objectives
This section will help you:
➢ Understand the limitations of internet sites
➢ Understand the different parts of an Internet address, including domains
➢ Understand the two main ways of finding web pages
➢ Understand how to evaluate a web-site.
Using the internet for research
The Internet does not provide all the information needed for university study. It is often
the mistaken view of students that everything they need is available on the Web. This is
incorrect. It is also incorrect that all information on the internet it free.
The main sources of information at university are books and journals. Having said that,
the Internet is often able to provide alternative material to either support what is in the
books and journals or can be used to verify information already found. Care also needs to
be taken about the information provided on web pages.
There are search engines available that locate scholarly information such as journal
articles and books, as well as reports and research papers. However, these search engines
do not locate all of the journals contained in the library databases. Whilst databases are
accessed via the Internet, the Library pays a subscription to the databases providers to get
access to the content. Therefore it is important to remember to search both the databases
and the internet to find the most relevant results.
In this section, when we are discussing the Web/Internet, we are referring to web sites
that are not found in our databases.
Anyone can publish a web page on any topic. Just because it is on the Internet does not
mean it is correct information. I can create a web page about Australian politics and say
that the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, is 6 feet tall, has ten children and
played soccer for Australia. We know most of this is incorrect. However, unless you are
familiar with Australian politics or you checked this information elsewhere, you would
believe it to be true. It is very important that once a website is found that it is carefully
evaluated for accuracy. We will be looking at how to search the Internet and then
evaluate what we find.
Locating Information
There are three main ways to search for material on the Internet:
Exploring through websites
Subject Directories
Search Engines
Exploring Web sites
Often your first introduction to the Web is through a web address (URL) that you have
identified or have been given. The components in a web address often give you some
insights or clues about the website - even before you start searching. If we look at the
components from the following URL, we can make some assumptions about the
following web site:
http://www.cqu.edu.au/
http://
- indicates the method by which the file is transferred over the
web. It stands for hypertext transfer protocol and most web
addresses start with this. Other alternatives include ftp or gopher.
www.cqu.edu.au
– the domain name, or location of the computer, called a server,
which hosts the page.
The domain name can be divided into the following components:
www - the www indicates the site is on 'world wide web' server. Not all addresses
start with www because not all web servers are named www. For example, the
university handbook address is http://handbook.cqu.edu.au/Handbook/
cqu - this is the institution/organisation name (in this case, CQU)
edu - this is the structure or purpose code (in this case, education)
au
- this is the country code (in this case, Australia)
The table below gives examples of how a URL often indicates the content of an Internet
site.
URL
includes:
.gov
Type of page
government
departments
.edu.au
Educational Institutions
in Australia
.ac.uk
Educational Institutions
in the United Kingdom
Commercial
organisation
.com
.org
Non-profit organisations
.mil
Military insitutions
.net
networks
URL (uniform resource
locator)
http://www.det.qld.gov.au/
http://www.cqu.edu.au
Examples
Department of
employment and
training
Central Queensland
University
http://www.mcdonalds.com
McDonald
http:www.arcbs.redcross.org.au
Red Cross
http://www.af.mil
http://www.acn.net.au
Air Force Link
Australia’s Cultural
Network
Educational (.edu or .ac) and government (.gov) sites are often more reputable than
other websites. The information on these sites are usually checked and verified before
they are allowed to be placed on the Internet. However, it is still necessary to be wary of
advertising and bias.
As a general rule, lecturers prefer you to use these types of web sites. Web sites created
by commercial organisations (.com) are often written to persuade you to use, buy or
promote something that they are involved with.
For example: a Government organisation might write a report on the Internet outlining
the good and bad effects of fast foods on people’s health. This is likely to be unbiased
and more factual than material on the McDonalds’ web site. McDonalds is unlikely to
write about the bad effects of its fast foods, but would promote the benefits of its
products. However, a government site about the environment may be biased by
government policy and the influence of lobby groups. It is best to find a range of
viewpoints when researching to provide an overview of your topic.
A useful feature of many websites is a links section to provide links to other websites that
may be useful. This can be a useful guide to finding similar sites that may assist your
research.
Subject Directories
Many organisations and individuals have created directories and indexes to information
on the Web/Internet. These are often subject or discipline-based, and can be quite useful.
Each subject directory has a broad heading and is then broken down to smaller sub
headings. For example:
 Business
o Accounting
 Banks
 Small business
 Marketing
o Promotion
o Advertising
o Product development
 Tourism
 Management
The advantages of using subject directories are:






Dedicated to one topic, e.g. Business
Often compiled by experts
Often have both search and browse options
Links may have abstracts describing what the webpage is about
Links to all types of materials
Unwanted material is excluded (if you click on a business link, all
websites will be about business).
Some examples of subject directories:
Intute: Social Sciences
http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences/
includes resources for business, management, economics and law
Internet Public Library
http://www.ipl.org/
Infomine
http://infomine.ucr.edu/
Academic Info
http://www.academicinfo.net/
resources picked for academic audience
KnowThis.com
http://www.knowthis.com/
Online tutorials, websites and news stories for marketing. The directory of websites can
be found at http://www.knowthis.com/information/search/search-the-best-marketingsites.htm
WebLaw - a subject gateway to Australian legal resources
http://www.weblaw.edu.au/weblaw/index.phtml
Search Engines
Search engines are like catalogues for the Internet. You can type in your keywords and
then the search engine hunts around the Internet for websites that have those keywords.
There are many different search engines with different search features. To see how to use
different search engines, go to the help or search tips section of the search engine. Be
aware that no search engine searches the entire Web. When you search two different
search engines, you will get some results that are the same, but you will retrieve different
results as well.
Example: Searching Google
To access Google go to:
www.google.com.au
Using the same search strategy as before, we will attempt to find web sites on measuring
customer preferences:
When searching Google, it is important to search using keywords not sentences.
Searching is similar to the catalogue and databases. However, Google does not require
you to use “AND” to combine the words. It automatically does it for you. If you need to
combine words with “OR” you need to put OR in capitals, eg. organisation OR
organization.
Use the Advanced Search to see more search options and ways to limit the types of
results that are displayed.
Note – because of the constantly changing nature of the Web, a search undertaken now
will probably differ from this search.
You will notice that the first few results do not really look relevant to this topic, but there
are relevant links further down the page.
Specialist Search Engines
There are a number of specialist search engines available. Some search for sites on
particular domains, such as government search engines, for particular formats, such as
news search engines or particular regions, such as Google Australia. There are also some
search engines that search for academic information.
Google Scholar is an example of an academic search engine. Using this search engine
you can locate journal articles, theses, books, abstracts and other scholarly literature
across all areas of research.
Google Scholar searches a range of free and subscription databases. Note that many of
the sources included in Google Scholar are subscription sources and you may not be able
to access them unless the Library has a subscription to that source. If you are taken to a
page which requires a password, the article is often not freely available. Some sites may
also require you to register to get free access to articles.
To be able to access articles that are available in library databases, please login to Google
Scholar through the library webpage. Go to SearchSmart and then select the letter 'G'
under Browse Databases by Title. When you click on the link to Google Scholar you will
be asked to login with your e.rolment details. Then when you search, you should be able
to access any articles held in CQU databases.
If you find a result that you cannot access, please check the Library Catalogue to see if
CQU has access to the article or book. For articles, use the Journal Title search and
search for the name of the journal the article is published in. You may need to do this if
the article is available in a database that is not searched by Google Scholar, such as
Proquest.
Example: Google Scholar
We will use the same strategy for finding resources on measuring customer preferences
Access Google Scholar via SearchSmart
Click on Advanced Scholar Search
Enter your keywords
article title
article authors
journal
date
publisher site / database
Note the results from this search are mainly journal articles. You may also find research
papers and other documents from authoritative sources.