Website Evaluation

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The Importance of Evaluation

Now that you’ve learned a bit about doing better searches on the Internet, let’s look at how to evaluate the information you’ve found.  

Why is evaluation on the Internet so important?  Library resources are much better for research because they have already been evaluated.  When you use a website for research, you have to evaluate whether it is good or bad.  And as you'll see, this can be quite tricky.

An Evaluation Example

Let’s start by looking at an example that illustrates this point. 

Let’s pretend that you’re writing a report on Martin Luther King.  You go to Google, your favorite Search Engine, type in Martin Luther King, and look at the results.  The site Martin Luther King Jr. – A True Historical Examination comes up and you decide it looks good, so you click on it.  After all, it says it is true and so it must be a good site… right?

Let’s look at how you might evaluate this page and you’ll see why it’s so important.  

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