17 August 2008

Internet Research Tools & Technique

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Welcome to the Internet. There is an extremely wide variety of material on the Internet, ranging in its accuracy, reliability, and value. It's your job as a searcher, then, to evaluate what you locate, in order to determine whether it suits your needs.

Article I: Internet Research – First Thing First

Information is everywhere on the Internet, existing in large quantities and continuously being created and revised. This information exists in a large variety of kinds (facts, opinions, stories, interpretations, statistics) and is created for many purposes (to inform, to persuade, to sell, to present a viewpoint, and to create or change an attitude or belief). For each of these various kinds and purposes, information exists on many levels of quality or reliability. It ranges from very good to very bad and includes every shade in between. More …….

Article II: Internet Research Process

There are millions of pages of information on the World Wide Web, and finding relevant and reliable information can be a challenge. Search engines are powerful tools that index millions of web sites. When entering a keyword into a search engine, you will receive a list with the number of hits or results and links to the related sites. The number of hits you receive may vary a great deal among different search engines. Some engines search only the titles of the web sites, and others search the full text. More ……….

Article III: Search Engine – Pool of Information

Search engines use automated software programs know as spiders or bots to survey the Web and build their databases. Web documents are retrieved by these programs and analyzed. Data collected from each web page are then added to the search engine index. When you enter a query at a search engine site, your input is checked against the search engine's index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best urls are then returned to you as hits, ranked in order with the best results at the top. More ………

Article IV: Evaluating The Internet Research

Source evaluation--the determination of information quality--is something of an art. That is, there is no single perfect indicator of reliability, truthfulness, or value. Instead, you must make an inference from a collection of clues or indicators, based on the use you plan to make of your source. More ………
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