Chris Nolan- Finding High Quality Information on the Web: Refining Your Search

Chris Nolan
Assistant University Librarian
Coates Library, Trinity University

Finding High-Quality Information on the Web

Refining your search

Google Search Engine

·         Some are sponsored links (usually in a shaded box at the top or in a column on the right)

·         Results are based upon the search engine:

§  Looking  for key words

§  How often websited get views

§  How often websites are linked to something else

·         Over 250 characteristics that Google takes into account

·         Search Engine Market Share 2010 U.S.A.

§  Google 66%

§  Yahoo 16%

§  Bing/MSN 11%

§  AOL 3 %

·         .com sites are commercial sites- they sell some kind of product

·         .org sites are organizations that do not sell products, but often try to sell ideas

·         .edu is mostly in reference to higher education, but has been given to school districts, etc.

·         How do you limit a search to just .edu sources?

§  Click advanced search

§  If on Google Scholar, click advanced scholar search

·         You can also limit to state, country, and lanugage

·         Creative commons will allow you to protect your work

·         Google Function

·         Googele Cache-Helps you get to a webpage (a stored copy from a few days before.)

·         Define: 'Multitasking' (Google will provide several definitions for the word you enter)

·         Google Scholar is a subset of Google (deciphers its credibility of a source)

·         Information is not always free

·         Google does not look at individual webpages, it is all done by algorithm

·         Google Books-might have the enire book

·         Google/Yahoo Dot Comparison site

·         Directories

·         Key Evaluation Points

§  Author

§  Publisher (or website creator)

§  Intended purpose/audience

§  Objectivity/bias

§  Substantiation for claims

§  Recency of information

As you can see, Google is a leading search engine with many useful features that users should take advantage of. One of the most helpful tools Google offers students is Google Scholar. It becomes very useful when needing to do research for reports or presentations. Now, I am also more aware of how to detect sponsored sources connected to Google versus relevant website pages. There are different techniques used to evaluate if a website is scholarly. Mr. Nolan helped us practice those techniques so that we can be more capable of deciphering academically sound websites. Here are the websites we evaluated:

What do you think of each of these?

• Martin Luther King Jr.
• http://www.martinlutherking.org/
•  Feline Reactions to Bearded Men
• http://www.improbable.com/airchives/classical/cat/cat.html
• Blondes to die out in 200 years
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2284783.stm