3. Research Project
• You have been asked to
research Martin Luther
King and type his name in
Google – one of the first
results is:
www.martinlutherking.org
• Is it a good source?
9. Check for Authority
• Who is the author of the
site?
• What is the authority or
expertise of the individual or
group?
• What else comes up when you
type the author’s name into a
search engine?
• Does the source have a
political or business agenda?
10. Objectivity/Bias
• Check for any indication of bias
• Look at the domain address:
.edu educational site ~ personal web
page
.gov government .uk British site
site
.org organization or .ca Canadian site
advocacy
group
.com commercial site
11. Objectivity/Bias
• What is the purpose of the site?
• Does the source have a political or
business agenda?
• Is there an organization sponsoring
the site?
• sponsored by a political, business or
advocacy group? If so, what can you
find out about that group?
14. Content and Accuracy
• Can the information be verified
using another source?
• Is there documentation to indicate
the sources of the information
• Does the site provide a list of
sources or a Works Cited page?
• Can you locate any of the source
material? How reliable is this
material?
16. Content and Accuracy
• Links
• Are there links to other
credible sites with
additional information?
• Does the site provide a
link for emailing the author
or webmaster?
• Did you reach this site
through a reputable link?
17. Research
• You found this site on famous
explorers for your history project
• Is it a good source?
www.allaboutexplorers.com
18. Research
• You found this site for your
science project
• Is it a good source?
www.malepregnancy.com
19. Currency
• Does the site clearly
state a date of creation
or a date for the most
recent update?
• Does the information
cover recent changes or
advances in the field or
topic you are
researching?
20. Summary
Some examples of authoritative
Any website you use must be sites…
evaluated- check for:
• Authority
• Objectivity/Bias
• Content and Accuracy
• Currency
Use authoritative sources
(example – online
encyclopedias and
databases) whenever
possible)
Notas del editor
Go into google and do a search for martin luther king – martinlutherking.org will be one of the first sites to come up – click on “The Truth About King” – view some of the facts that are here – obvious bias – at the bottom of the home page click on “hosted by Strormfront” ask how such a site could appear at the top of google listings – then go to next slide and discuss how a search engine works Note – you may have to have your site administrator unblock www.martinlutherking.org and www.stormfront.org – check prior to the presentation
Starting with heavily used servers and popular pages a software program called a “spider” crawls the web. It will follow the links of the pages on each site. Have built in method to detect spamming To make for more useful results, most search engines store more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page. Location and frequency method is also used – where it appears in the page (near the beginning is better) and how often it appears Also contain advertising… Pages are also ranked based on how popular they are – ie how many other pages link to that site – google calls this “pagerank”
no one has evaluated these results so you must!!!!
.org, .com, .uk, .ca can be registered by anyone -
