Dancing on Heaven's Door Research Paper, Page 8

Finding Good Quality Web Sources

Web resources must be evaluated for accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage. Some “tricks” to use in evaluating web sites are these:

• Check to see if the author of the web page has included a date to indicate when it was last updated. It may be at the bottom of the page.
• Examine the domain name. Usually, but not always, domain names in the U.S. which are commercial end in .com. Those which are governmental end in .gov. Educational institutions use .edu, and non-profits and other organizations use .org.
• A tilde (the symbol ˜) in the URL usually indicates that you are viewing someone's personal web page. Some domains which host personal web pages are geocities, angelfire, tripod, and aol.
• If a site has a long file name, try taking off the last part of the URL so that you can go to the primary web page that is hosting it.
• If you want to know who is hosting a site, go to www.register.com.

It is also important to learn how to improve the accuracy of your web searches. For example, if you are researching the religion of the Bali tribe in Africa and you keep coming up with information about Hinduism on the Indonesian island of Bali, you might want to search on Bali Africa to narrow your search. Bali -Indonesia finds the word “Bali” and excludes sites with the word “Indonesia.” It was not very fruitful since it led me to sites about restaurants and mini-blinds. You can also put a phrase in quotes to narrow your search, as in "Bali tribe".

A good site on the internet to find out more about both resource evaluation and search accuracy is Search the Web & Evaluate Web Resources. You may also want to take a look at the document in Internet Search Strategies on my faculty web site or use Google Search Help.

To wrap up, proceed to page 9.