Quaratiello_CH6.docx

Finding Websites IF YOU’RE LIKE MOST STUDENTS TODAY, YOU BEGIN YOUR research by going to an internet search engine, probably Google, no matter how much you’re told to use your library’s resources first. But if you never go beyond the surface web and use the types of resources highlighted in the pre...

Finding Websites IF YOU’RE LIKE MOST STUDENTS TODAY, YOU BEGIN YOUR research by going to an internet search engine, probably Google, no matter how much you’re told to use your library’s resources first. But if you never go beyond the surface web and use the types of resources highlighted in the previous two chapters, you’ll be missing out on a lot of valuable information that might very well help you get a better grade on your research paper. Still, the internet can provide some amazing sources if you know how to use search engines effectively and carefully evaluate the information you find. This chapter will explain how to more effectively find reliable information using internet search engines. The internet has certainly evolved tremendously since its early days, when it was a text-only medium with very little interactivity. It has emerged in the past decade as such an essential medium that most of us could not imagine going through a day without using it on our laptops or an hour without using it on our phones. This realization took on new meaning during the COVID- 19 pandemic, when we all became even more reliant upon it. What began as a resource mostly used in government and higher education has emerged as a predominantly commercial and social medium. Most businesses rely on it to conduct their daily affairs. Buying products and paying bills online, which used to be novelties, have become the preferred way of doing business for many people. In addition to business applications, the internet has also become an indispensable communication platform, as demonstrated by the pervasive use of social media. Long before Amazon and Facebook and all the other big tech companies came into existence, the internet was primarily an informational resource, and that is still one of its main purposes. The amount of information on the internet has grown exponentially and will continue to do so, making it harder and harder to find the precise information that you need. THE STRUCTURE OF THE INTERNET By 2021, there were over 1.7 billion websites on the internet. Each of these sites includes one or more web pages. Think of each site as a street; using this image, picture each page as a house on that street. Some streets have only one house; others have many. Every house on the same street will have a similar address, except for the unique house number. Every page on a website will have an address (a URL or uniform resource locator) that starts in a similar way. The three-letter extension at the end of this first part of a URL is called a top-level domain (TLD). Popular TLDs are .com, .edu, .gov, but there are dozens of others. The TLD of a particular site is your first indication of the type of information that will be provided on the site. Specific URLs for pages in a website beyond the home page are lengthier and more complicated, with backslashes to separate each portion of this address. The term page is misleading because the internet does not confine the designer of a website to a certain amount of space. Pages can be of all different lengths. A page on the web is defined as the space that you can scroll through at a particular URL. In addition to providing information, most web pages also contain links to other web pages. You can access other pages by clicking on these hypertext links. They might take you to another page within the site or a different site altogether. As has already been explained, the internet has a superficial layer referred to as the surface web, which includes all of the sites that are accessible to anyone. These sites can be found by using internet search engines. The sur- face web is the tip of the iceberg, with most internet content being below this top level in the deep web. Most websites are accessible only to those with the proper login credentials or the exact URL. THE CONTENT OF THE INTERNET Because of the sheer bulk of information available on the internet, only some broad generalizations can be offered here based on the categories of information providers. Business Websites Companies provide lots of information about their products and services on the internet. Most of this information is advertising, but sometimes such information can be helpful. If you’re writing a paper about lawsuits against a particular pharmaceutical company, for example, you will certainly want to take a look at its website. Most commercial sites are not only sources of information but also interactive sites where customers can purchase products and perform transactions. The URL for a commercial site home page usually ends with .com, but there are other commercial TLDs, including .pro, which is specifically for doctors, lawyers, and accountants; and .biz. There is even a .pizza TLD! Many magazine and newspaper publishers are .coms, and you can access a lot of material from these sites. The downside is that you either have to pay a subscription fee or else suffer through a deluge of pop-up and sidebar ads. News media companies, which used to provide information only through television, radio, and traditional print format, are now more often accessed online. Some, like the Huffington Post and the Daily Wire, are exclusively internet outlets. As mentioned in chapter 2, be especially careful in evaluating the bias of these sites. Nonprofit Organization Websites Nonprofit organizations also have a strong presence on the internet. The purpose of such organizations from their founding long before the emergence of the internet has been to promote causes, so their websites have always been designed to help in their missions. No matter how altruistic this mis- sion is, it’s important to beware of propaganda and bias when viewing these sites. They’re certainly not out to make a profit the way the commercial sites are, but they often have the ulterior motive of raising funds for their cause or soliciting supplies and volunteers. For example, go to redcross.org and you’ll see the prominent links: Donate, Give Blood, and Volunteer at the top of the home page. Scroll down and you’ll even find a link to the Red Cross Store, where you can buy all sorts of emergency supplies. The TLD for these sites is usually .org, but URLs for nonprofits can end in other ways, such as .museum, which is reserved for—you guessed it—museums. Governmental Websites Departments and agencies of the US government have always had a strong presence online since the internet originated in the late 1960s as a project of the Department of Defense. Although government websites can be very useful sources of information, it’s important to remember that the information provided may have a bias that supports the current administration’s agenda. If a URL includes the TLD .gov, you have obviously found a governmental organization, but there are related top-level domains, such as .mil, which specifies a military site. The best way to find government agencies is not by using a search engine. Go directly to USA.gov, which is a clearinghouse of all governmental information. Google and other search engines are unable to access many of these government sites, which are part of the deep web. Educational Institution Websites Every college and university has a website that serves as both a marketing tool for potential students and a portal for student transactions. Current students primarily log in to the applications they need on their school’s website to post homework, use library resources, sign up for courses, pay tuition, or conduct other transactions. Most of the pages accessible via search engines serve marketing purposes, but colleges often let students and faculty post their own personal pages, which might appear in search engine results. Although these web pages can be excellent sources for research, be sure to evaluate the material using the criteria explained in chapter 2. You might have at your disposal the wisdom of a world-renowned expert in Shakespearean studies who has made his research available with no thought of financial gain. Or, conversely, you might be able to view a fraternity site that explains how to brew your own beer. Although most college website URLs include .edu, some use the TLD .university. If a URL ends in .academy or .school, you are probably looking at a K–12 institution. Personal Websites Anyone can create a website. Even a child can easily construct one with no help from an adult. With the current ease of creating websites, information is present and accessible on the internet at a level that is unprecedented in human history, and the availability of these primary sources is a significant development. Much of this information is personal and useless to most viewers. Information on a research topic that’s found on a personal website might be incorrect. Be critical when using personal sites, and make sure that the original source of any secondary information is clearly cited. Personal sites often end with .net because this is the TLD of internet service providers (ISPs) through which most individuals get their online access, but a site with the TLD .name might also be someone’s personal website. Social Media Platforms Although individuals can post anything on personal websites, many have chosen to use social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter instead to express personal opinions, recount daily activities, post pictures, and so on. Social media sites have emerged in recent years as one of the predominant uses of the internet. An emerging issue of concern with these platforms, how- ever, is the amount of censorship that occurs on them. Rather than acting as utilities like cell phone companies, social media companies are acting more like publishers and edit what their users post if it is too controversial. In some cases, information is deleted altogether. Social networking sites pro- vide a mixed bag for your research; they’re definitely an interesting gateway to primary sources, but be cautious in evaluating the information provided. As a general rule, you should avoid using social media posts in your research. As with any source of information, however, determining the identity of the author is important. If your research involves particular people who have Facebook pages, this could be a useful resource for primary research. If the author of a social media post is a known expert in your subject, this post may prove to be a valuable primary source, but remember that authority itself is not the only criterion of evaluating information. Twitter (https://twitter.com), the popular social networking site that allows users to communicate by posting brief tweets, provides small pieces of information that could potentially aid you in your research. If your topic concerns a current issue, take a look and see what comes up. You may find a link to a great website, an answer to a particular question, or an announce- ment about a relevant event happening in your area. Videos YouTube is the most popular source for accessing videos on practically any topic imaginable. Both trash and treasure can be found on YouTube, just as on the internet in general. You can find videos of everything from an elementary school field trip to a butterfly museum to a lecture given by a highly respected astronomer on the origins of the universe. YouTube has come under fire in recent years for its policies, which essentially result in what many people claim is censorship. Videos about certain controversial subjects have indeed been banned by this platform, and some users have been prevented from posting videos altogether. YouTube, however, is not the only outlet for videos online. You can also use general search engines and specify that you only want to find video material. Another platform that has recently emerged as a competitor to YouTube is Rumble, a site that provides an alternative for users who have been banned from YouTube. USING SEARCH ENGINES When looking for information on the internet, your first and perhaps only stop has probably been Google. Its popularity is reflected by the fact that it is the only search engine name that has become a verb, with internet users often referring to googling topics. Keep in mind, however, that any search engine, including Google, searches only a small portion of the internet. Google has a very sophisticated relevancy-ranking technology that determines order in part by popularity and yields what some users consider the most pertinent results. But beware—commercial website developers have found ways to work around Google’s ranking system to get their websites in the top ten results. Google’s home page is simple and uncluttered. You’re probably already familiar with it. In addition to its search engine, Google also provides a variety of specific information that you can access by clicking on the square in the top right corner, which consists of nine dots. This is where you go to find maps, news headlines, shopping information, and so on, but it does not provide access to the research databases mentioned previously: Google Books, where you can search for books available to purchase and also view free pages and chapters, and Google Scholar, which provides access to scholarly literature but should not take the place of the databases to which your library subscribes. It is easiest to access these two Google resources Although Google is currently the most popular search engine by far with about 90 percent of search traffic going through its site, there are a number of alternatives. One reason to use these other search engines is because you may get different results depending on the search engine’s algorithms. Bing (bing.com) is Microsoft’s search engine, while Yahoo! yahoo.com), one of the oldest directories on the internet, is still around. Meta-search engines simultaneously search multiple search engines including Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and others. Although these meta-search tools are not used as much as the search engines they cover, Dogpile (dogpile.com) is the most popular in this category. A newcomer to the market is DuckDuckGo (duckduckgo.com). It is fast becoming the preferred search engine for those who value their privacy because it doesn’t store search histories like Google does, so you don’t receive targeted advertising, and your search history will have no effect on what results you get. There are actually dozens of other search engines, but I will not include a comprehensive list here because such a list would quickly become outdated. For such a list, ironically, go to Google and search for “search engines other than Google.” No matter which search engine you choose, you will see a search box in which you can enter your terms and, in return, get a list of links to sites that contain these terms. As with any database, the relevance of the information you find will depend, to a large extent, on the keywords you choose to enter in this search box, and it may require some trial and error to find exactly what you are looking for. You should also go beyond the first page of sites listed because your search may have yielded thousands or even millions of sites. If you don’t find anything relevant in the first few screens of results, however, try a different combination of search terms. As in any database, entering more keywords or using synonyms for your keywords can retrieve better results. You might also try limiting your search to the past month or the past year depending on your topic. You can also specify a particular date range, which is helpful if you want to retrieve only sites that appeared before a certain date. Most search engines offer these date-limiting options. In order to find the most relevant websites, you can use quotation marks in Google and some other search engines to find an exact phrase. If you enter Faith Hill in a search engine without quotation marks, for example, you will retrieve all the sites that contain the words faith and hill, so some of these sites would be about the country singer while others would be irrelevant, including a number relating to mountains and the religion. By searching for “Faith Hill,” you will eliminate such irrelevant sites. Another way to sharpen your search is to use plus and minus signs. Elim- inating a term from your search can help you to avoid too much irrelevant material. Just place a hyphen (-) before any word or phrase that you want to be eliminated. This basically serves the same purpose as the Boolean operator NOT. For example, if you entered “Pirates of the Caribbean” -“Johnny Depp” in just about any of the search engines, you will increase your chances of finding sites concerned with the Disney World attraction rather than Johnny Depp fan club sites and other sites concerned with the swashbuckling movie series. Although the default in most search engines is to perform a Boolean OR search for any of your terms, relevancy ranking usually results in those sites that have all the terms appearing first. Sometimes, however, you may see a result indicating that one of your terms is not included. To eliminate such sites, just put a plus sign (+) before a keyword that must be found. Most search engines have advanced search features that facilitate the searching process. The Google advanced search form (google.com/advanced_ search) provides a series of boxes that you can fill in, which allows you to be more specific. You can limit your search to web pages that contain “all these words” (AND), “any of these words” (OR), or “none of these words” (NOT). In addition to these Boolean capabilities, you can limit your search by language and date updated and even specify where you want the terms to occur, which is similar to field-specific searching. For example, you can specify that your terms be found only in the titles of web pages, which can help retrieve more relevant sites, or anywhere in the page. You can also limit your search to certain types of sites by specifying a TLD such as .edu or .org. To find out more about the advanced search features of other search engines, just click on the Help link that is usually provided in a menu or at the bottom of the home page. EVALUATING WEBSITES When evaluating the results of your search, make sure that you can distinguish between real information and advertising. Although most of the information found on the surface web is free, you should expect to be inundated with advertising. These ads are more than just sidebar images that you can ignore; sometimes they appear as annoying pop-ups that can actually make it hard to navigate a site. Other times they can appear to be legitimate links in your results list. Look up flu vaccine using Google, for example, and the first result you may see ads for pharmacy chains that have paid Google for this premiere spot. The only way to tell that these websites are ads is by the tiny label “Ad” that appears before the link. Ad revenue, after all, is what fuels the tech companies that provide search engines free of charge. As a general rule, avoid using any links in your search result that are identified as “ads” or “sponsored” sites. Even after you have eliminated such promotional sites, you must vigilantly evaluate all sites if you are looking for objective and trustworthy sources of information. As explained in chapter 2, you must ask the following questions: Who? What? When? Why? and How? I will review each of these questions below and how they particularly relate to websites as I evaluate an actual website called Operation Clambake: Undressing the Church of Scientology since 1996, viewable at xenu.net. This notorious website even has an entry in Wikipedia. Evaluating authority is the first criterion to consider when determining if a website is appropriate for your research because so many websites, unlike books and periodicals, have questionable origins. Identify who individually produced the site and/or what organization is affiliated with it in order to determine the authority of the information provided. Regarding the Oper- ation Clambake site, you have to scroll down to the very bottom of a long home page to find a link to the author, Andreas Heldal-Lund. After clicking this link, you will learn that Andreas “is alone responsible,” so no larger organization has reviewed the information provided on this site. This should bring up a red flag! Apparently, Andreas has “a very busy day job” and that he operates “this site alone, at my own cost, in my spare time.” Hmmm . . . so what makes him an authority on Scientology? There is no indication that he has any advanced degrees, experience, or other publications that might bestow some credibility to his site. Evaluating the purpose of a website is especially important because the primary purpose of so many websites is to market a product or promote a cause. The purpose of Operation Clambake is hinted at by the subtitle: “Undressing the Church of Scientology since 1996,” which suggests that the author wants to expose some secrets about this controversial religious denomination. What this purpose has to do with clambakes is unclear, but all indications derived from evaluating content are that the author is opposed to Scientology and seeks to denigrate it. A link to the “Leaving Scientology Resource Guide” is accompanied by the blurb “Leaving Scientology may be the most important decision of your life.” Other links include “The Scandal of Scientology” “The Cult of Greed,” and “Just Like Hitler and Stalin.” Scan- dal, cult, and greed are words with negative connotations, as is the allusion to infamous dictators, which all contributes to the critical tone of this site. The author, however, does not seem to be addressing students writing research papers about Scientology. His audience more likely consists of people who are somehow affiliated with the group, whether they be current Scientolo- gists questioning their beliefs, former followers of this religion, or family members who are concerned about their loved ones who are Scientologists. The content of any informational source is a primary consideration when determining its usefulness in your research. When it comes to websites found through internet search engines, the brief blurbs under the search results can be misleading. To determine how relevant a website is to your topic, scan the page linked to from your search engine results looking for headings and keywords. You can use the Find feature in your web browser to locate pertinent topical keywords. Even if you are on the home page of a website, get an overall idea of the structure of the larger website that this page is a part of. What other information is available on the website? All we are presented with at the Operation Clambake site is a list of links with brief descriptions written by the author. There is no substantial original content. Although the sites that are linked to may be useful for your research, evaluate each one on its own merits. Determine when a website’s information was last updated can be difficult because so many websites are neglected and outdated. This might be an important consideration depending on your topic. It is not obvious from information on the Operation Clambake home page when this site was last updated. There are tweets reposted in the sidebar from 2021, but under the link to latest news, the most recent post is from 2015. Evaluating the overall quality of a website is crucial. Does the website’s design look amateurish rather than professional? Are there any blatant inaccuracies? Answers to these questions may suggest that a site is not cred- ible. Despite its posting of tweets from 2021, Operation Clambake has an old-fashioned look about it, like a site you might have seen in the earlier days of the internet. The design is very amateurish and unprofessional. Although there are no blatant inaccuracies, there are some grammatical errors, which indicate that the text was not carefully proofread. A good website for your research does not have to pass all five of my crite- ria—Who? What? When? Why? and How?—but if it fails more than two, you should look elsewhere for a primary source. Although Operation Clambake doesn’t pass a basic evaluation, it may lead you to some other websites that will. The internet is an amazing resource that has transformed the way we do research. A lot of the information that is now available literally at our fin- gertips was previously inaccessible or, at best, very difficult to obtain. It’s no surprise, then, that you might think googling your topic is all you need to do to find the sources for your research paper. If that were the case, however, this book would be very short.