Evaluating Sources
and Searching the Internet
 No matter the format, to be useful an information
source must have two things:
1. It must be relevant to your topic and purpose
2. It must have the appropriate degree of credibility
required for your audience
Scholarly work, including entry level
undergraduate college assignments, require
reputable, scholarly sources.
 How do you determine relevance?
 The item should be “about” your topic, not just mention
your topic in passing
 Subject terms can help determine the topic
 Read abstract or summary
 Length: is there enough information to make the source
useful?
 Needs to be “about” your topic in an appropriate format,
by a credible author, with suitable sourcing
 Is currency important?
 Needed in some disciplines (sciences, social sciences)
 Need for some projects
 Check date published or revised
 Sometimes a standard work is required no matter when
it was published
 Published or not?
 Published means available in an unchanging form
 Books, periodicals
 Some web sites
 Even some published material is less useful
 Letters to the editor are of limited value except as an
expression of one individual’s opinion
 Concerned with the content of the information source
leading to a judgment of the worthiness
 All sources must be carefully scrutinized, but some
bear more careful examination
 Wikis
 Blogs
 Personal web sites
 Must be credible, valid, and reliable
 A checklist for evaluating sources
Credible
Accurate
Reasonable
Supported
 Trustworthy source (peer-reviewed?)
 Author’s credentials (not anonymous; education and
affiliations)
 Evidence of quality control (not simply copied from
somewhere, good production values)
 Known or respected authority
 Organizational support (professional associations,
universities)
 Goal: An authoritative source that shows evidence of being
trustworthy and truthful.
 Up-to-date (must supply date of publication or revision)
 Fact-based (as opposed to opinion-based; no vague
language or sweeping generalizations)
 Detailed and exact
 Comprehensive (doesn’t leave out important info; isn’t
one sided)
 Appropriate audience and purpose (scholarly!)
 Goal: A source that is correct today focused on showing the
entire truth
 Fair, balanced, objective, reasoned
(objectivity)
 No conflict of interest
 Fact-based (not opinion-based)
 Absence of logical fallacies
 Unbiased tone (moderateness, “black or white” thinking)
 Goal: a source that engages the topic thoughtfully and
reasonably with an emphasis on truth finding
 Sources listed (bibliography)
 Corroboration available (substantiated)
 Claims are backed up with evidence
(research, not supposition)
 Documentation is supplied
 Goal: a source that provides convincing evidence for the
claims made and also can be triangulated (two other
credible sources support the findings)
 Contain
 Author
 If no author is listed, is there a reputable organizational
sponsor (Federal government, etc.)?
 Name; title, education, or position; organizational
affiliations; contact information
 Currency
 If currency is not important, is there a date given for page
creation or revision?
 According to Pew Internet project, May 2010
 79% of Americans use the Internet daily
 Study published in Journal of Marketing (2004),
“Beyond Adoption: Development and Application of a
Use-Diffusion Model,” by Shih and Venkatesh
 30% Internet users are tech-savvy
 The truth? Only 22% of Americans actually know
how to effectively use the Internet
 Web browsers are software programs that send
requests to web servers and allow users to view
and access information
 Web Browsers
 Microsoft Internet Explorer
 Mozilla Firefox
 Google Chrome
 Apple Safari
 Web browsers (client) send requests for each element
on a web page (images, tables, text, etc.) housed on a
server
 Each connection between a client and server fulfills
only one request.
 A new connection must be made
for each HTTP request, even if
the elements are housed on a
single web page
 Uniform Resource Locator
 Address of a webpage
 http://www.dixie.edu
 http:// (HyperText Transfer Protocol – the “language” of the
item)
 www (not all web sites include www, some work with or
without)
 .dixie (domain)
 .edu (domain extension)
 .edu = educational institution, college, university, or
research organization with a bona fide U.S. presence
 .com = a commercial or business enterprise, supposedly
with a U.S. presence (most common domain extension)
 .gov = U.S. government entity, largely federal level
 .mil = U.S. military entity
 .net = an business entity focused on the Internet
(second most common domain extension)
 .org = a not-for-profit entity (including churches, K-12
schools, charities, political groups, etc.)
 Search engines are software programs that build huge
databases of web content (pages) and enable users to search
those databases using keywords
 Search Engines (general)
 Google
 Yahoo! Search
 Bing
 Wolfram Alpha (numbers)
 Cuil (cool)
 Specialized search engines
 Spider
 Crawls, linking between web sites
 Collects information (URLs, indexing content)
 Creates huge database
 When you search Google (or any other search engine)
you are actually not searching the “web”
 You are searching that spider’s representation of the
web
 Different search engines produce very different results even when
using the same search terms
 Different spiders create different databases
 Databases differ in size
 Different indexing protocols
 Updating schedules vary
 No search engine spider accesses all of the web
 Invisible web, hidden web
 Part of the web that cannot be accessed by search engines
 Bank records, medical records, Department of defense secrets, etc.
 Includes many library databases (not accessible through search engines)
 Differences
 Which results are found
 How results are ranked
 Ranking based on individual algorithms
 Secret – but experts guess
 Page popularity (number of pages linking to it)
 “Fuzzy and” (documents with all terms are ranked first, followed by
documents containing some terms or one term)
 Importance (web site traffic and quality of links)
 Recent years, geographical location and individual’s previous searches
 Usefulness and efficiency depends on individual
preferences and search terms
 Don’t be afraid to use more than one search engine,
just as you might use more than one library database
 Look beyond first 10 results (default display)
 Use advanced searching techniques
 Default search
 Search engines automatically insert “and” between search
terms
 nuclear waste storage = nuclear and waste and storage
 Words not searched together impacts meaning
 Use “phrase searching”
 Putting search phrases (more than one word that should be
searched together) in quotation marks forces the phrase to be
searched together
 “nuclear waste” storage = nuclear waste and storage
 Eliminate unneeded and/or common words
 Articles (a, an, the)
 Interrogatives (who, what, where, when, how)
 Prepositions (in, for, at, etc.)
 Punctuation is ignored except
 Apostrophe (hadn’t, didn’t)
 Dollar sign to indicate prices (nikon 400 vs. nikon $400)
 Hyphen (full-text) (read as minus sign if preceded by a space)
 Underscore (quick_sort)
 Don’t search: what is the truth about global warming?
 Do search: truth global warming
 Capitalization doesn’t matter
 Utah = uTaH = utah
 Eliminate unwanted terms
 Use “minus” sign
 “nuclear waste” storage –medical
 Removes the result if the term medical appears
 Google automatically stems words:
 A search for run will also return
 runs
 running
 runner
 If you want to stop Google from stemming, use the plus ( + )
sign in front of the word
 +run
 Search synonyms
 ~car
 car, cars, automobiles, vehicles, etc.
 Eliminate unwanted words, or can use minus sign ( - )
 Increase results per page
 Search within a site or domain
 Example: dixie.edu or .gov
 Limit results by date published or updated
 Limit where keywords are located (in title, in URL)
 Limit by language or region
 Find similar results
 iGoogle (can customize
search preferences)
 Google news
 Google images
 Google videos
 Google blog search
 Google earth
 Google product search
 Google maps
 Google finance
 Google books
 Google Goog 411
 Google docs
 Word processor
 Presentation software
 Spreadsheet program
 Blogger
 You’re now ready to take Quiz 5.
 It’s located in Module 5. Although the quiz is open
book, remember that the Final Exam is not, so you’ll
need to actually be learning the content not just
filling in the bubbles.
 If you have any questions or run into any problems,
please let us know.
 This class is much easier for students who work
quickly through the modules. Don’t be afraid to work
ahead and get the entire class done!