Searching the Internet Wisely

There have been many occasions in my internet-searching life where I have googled something in hopes of finding a good, academically sound source of information and found (in the first 10 or 20 hits) only popular sites that, while interesting, were definitely not helpful. During his presentation yesterday, Chris Nolan explained the reason behind the madness. Google actually lists search results in order of their "relevance,"which includes how many times other sites link to the website in question. Basically, this means that popular websites like CNN.com are usually far above websites from universities or academic journals, which is convenient for the majority of people, but not for school. I'm so glad Mr. Nolan explained several ways that this problem can be avoided. Google offers an advanced search option, in which you can limit your search by having Google only search websites that end in ".edu" which is useful, because webpages that come up are likely to be written by university professors who are credible, and often citable sources. Also, Google offers a more scholarly search engine, aptly named GoogleScholar, which only searches for academically trustworthy sources. I've actually used it already-just last night I had to do a literature search for a biology lab paper, and using GoogleScholar (as opposed to the SciFinder Scholar database, which only one person can use at a time-so annoying!) saved me a ton of time!

One thing I found really surprising was that the anti-Martin Luther King group was able to get the martinlutherking.org domain before any other, pro-MLK groups were able to claim it. Really, the entire site shocked me, because I was definitely not prepared for such a discriminatory site. It definitely emphasizes a good point though-it's important to be wary of .org sites (as well as .gov and .com sites) because they are often incredibly biased, and definitely not something you want to be taking for absolute truth, in research or in general internet surfing.