Secrets of Searching

Internet researchers should adopt “The Principle of Salt Grains” says Tara Calishain, who explains that this means, “You should take every page on the Internet with a grain of salt.”

With practice, you’ll develop a sense for which sites are legitimate and which are not. But if you’re new to online search or you’d simply like a practical technique for evaluating any Web page and the information it contains, she says in her book Web Search Garage (Upper Saddle River, NJ” Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference, 2005), 108, try asking these six questions:

1. Where does this page reside? If the domain is .edu or .gov or .mil, “you can generally give it a little more credibility….You also need to consider whether the site resides on its own domain or not. I tend to automatically give a little bit more credibility to a site that has its own domain rather than a site hosted on a free Web service…”
2. Who made the statement? “When a site is on its own domain, you can get some additional information about the author by looking to see who registered the domain (you can do domain register lookups at http://www.domainsearch.com/).” Also look for an “About This Site” or “About Us” page on the site.
3. Why are they making this statement? “If you’re reviewing the statements on a site, consider why they’re being made…to sell something? To get you to support a cause? To reinforce an argument? To teach you something?”
4. What are they doing to establish the truth of the statement? “Generally speaking, the more ‘out there’ a statement is the more I’m going to look to some kind of sourcing for it…Of course, sources vary in their credibility… When you see a citation or a source, go look it up…”
5. How long have they been online? “Was (the site) thrown up twelve minutes ago in response to a current trend, or has it been up for several years? You can get some of this information from the domain registration information. Sometimes sites date their content, or have a ‘last update’ note on their site, which can also give you some information…If a site has been sitting dormant for months )and in some cases years), I will tend to give it less credibility…”
6. What are other sites saying about them? “Do a link check in a full-text search engine and see who is linking to the site and what they’re saying. If no one’s linking to a site, it might be very new, so don’t take that as a knock against it. But do pay attention to news stories (especially very credible institutions) and what they say about the site.”