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 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
Evaluating Sources
and Searching the Internet
 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
Scholarly work, including entry level
undergraduate college assignments, require
reputable, scholarly sources.
 How do you determine relevance?
 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
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 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.
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 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
 Sources listed (bibliography)
 Corroboration available (substantiated)
 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
 Contain
 Author
 Claims are backed up with evidence
(research, not supposition)
 If no author is listed, is there a reputable organizational
sponsor (Federal government, etc.)?
 Documentation is supplied
 Name; title, education, or position; organizational
affiliations; contact information
 Goal: a source that provides convincing evidence for the
claims made and also can be triangulated (two other
credible sources support the findings)
 Currency
 If currency is not important, is there a date given for page
creation or revision?
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 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
 Uniform Resource Locator
 Each connection between a client and server fulfills
only one request.
 http://www.dixie.edu
 A new connection must be made
for each HTTP request, even if
the elements are housed on a
single web page
 Address of a webpage
 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)
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 .edu = educational institution, college, university, or
research organization with a bona fide U.S. presence
 Search engines are software programs that build huge
databases of web content (pages) and enable users to search
those databases using keywords
 .com = a commercial or business enterprise, supposedly
with a U.S. presence (most common domain extension)
 Search Engines (general)
 .gov = U.S. government entity, largely federal level
 Google
 .mil = U.S. military entity
 Yahoo! Search
 .net = an business entity focused on the Internet
(second most common domain extension)
 Bing
 .org = a not-for-profit entity (including churches, K-12
schools, charities, political groups, etc.)
 Wolfram Alpha (numbers)
 Cuil (cool)
 Specialized search engines
 Spider
 Different search engines produce very different results even when
using the same search terms
 Different spiders create different databases
 Crawls, linking between web sites
 Databases differ in size
 Collects information (URLs, indexing content)
 Different indexing protocols
 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
 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)
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 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)
 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
 Importance (web site traffic and quality of links)
 Recent years, geographical location and individual’s previous searches
 Eliminate unneeded and/or common words
 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
 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
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 Google automatically stems words:
 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
 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
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 iGoogle (can customize
search preferences)
 Google news
 Google images
 Google videos
 Google blog search
 Google earth
 Google product search
 Google finance
 You’re now ready to take Quiz 5.
 Google books
 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.
 Google Goog 411
 Google docs
 Word processor
 Presentation software
 Spreadsheet program
 Blogger
 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!
 Google maps
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