Evaluating Web Pages:
Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask
(Adapted from a UC Berkeley Teaching Library Internet Workshops Tutorial)
Evaluating web pages skillfully requires you to do two things at once:
1. Train your eye and your fingers to use a series of techniques to help you quickly find what you need to know about web pages.
2. Train your mind to think critically, even suspiciously, by asking a series of questions to help you decide how much a web page should be trusted.
1. What can the URL tell you?
Techniques for Web Page Evaluation:
§ Before you leave the list of search results, before you click and get interested in anything written on the page, gather as much information as you can from the URLs of each page.
§ After you have done that, choose pages that are most likely to be the most reliable and trustworthy.
Questions to ask:
Is it somebody’s personal page?
§ Read the URL carefully:
o Look for a personal name (ex. ncaddigan or Caddigan) following a tilde (~), a percent sign (%), or the words “users”, “members”, or “people.”
o Is the server a commercial ISP or other provider of web page hosting (like aol.com or geocities.com)?
What type of domain does it come from?
(educational, nonprofit, commercial, government, etc.)
§ Is the domain extension appropriate for the content?
o Government sites: look for .gov, .mil
o Educational Sites: look for .edu
o Nonprofit organizations: look for .org
o Country codes such as .us, .uk, .es, .pl
Is the URL published by someone that makes sense?
Who “published” the page?
§ Usually, the publisher is the organization/group or person running and controlling the website.
§ Have you heard of this group/organization before?
§ Does it correspond to the name of the site? Should it?
2. Scan the web page well!
Techniques for Web Page evaluation:
§ Look for links that say “About us,” “Philosophy,” “Background,” etc.
§ If you can’t find any links like these, you can sometimes find this information if you truncate back the URL.
§ Look for the date “last updated”- usually at the bottom of the web page. Check the date on all the pages on the site.
Questions to ask:
Who wrote the web page?
§ Look for the name of the author, organization, institution, agency, or whoever is responsible for the page
o An e-mail contact is not enough (though using the e-mail contact is a great way to find out more information.)
§ If there is no personal author (which is often the case), look for an agency or organization that claims responsibility for the page.
o If you can’t find this, find the publisher by truncating back the URL. Does this publisher claim responsibility for the content?
Is the page dated? Is it current enough? Does it matter?
§ Is the information on the web page current or is it outdated? How recent the date needs to be depends on our needs.
o For some topics, you want current information (statistics on crime rates increasing or decreasing or how many people in the United States are currently unemployed)
o For others, you want information put on the web near the time it became known. (The number of gold medals the United States won in the first week of the Olympics is different from the number won at the end of the Olympics, right?)
o In some cases, the importance of the date is to tell you whether the web page author is still keeping an interest in the page, or has abandoned it.
What are the author’s credentials on this subject?
§ Does the background or education of the author look like someone who might be qualified to write about this topic? Anyone can put anything on the internet. Your job is to be able to distinguish between the trustworthy and the questionable!
§ Could the page by written by someone who is a hobbyist, a self-proclaimed expert or an enthusiast?
o Is the page just an opinion? (A web page entitled “I love swimming is obviously just an opinion, right?)
o Is there any reason you should believe its content more than any other page? (A web page written by George Bush’s sister vs. a web page written by someone who is a fan of George Bush but does not know him personally may have very different content.)
o Is the page a rant, an extreme view, possibly distorted or exaggerated? (A web page entitled “Bananas: the worst fruit ever!” is obviously someone’s opinion and not general fact.)
3. Look for indicators of quality information
Techniques for Web evaluation:
· Look for a link called “links”, “additional sites”, “related links”, etc.
· Look for little footnote numbers or links that might refer to documentation. Then, take a minute to explore them. What kinds of publications or sites are they? Are they real? (This may be important because, on the Internet, it is possible to make up references because there is often no publisher editing the pages.)
· Check out the publisher of the page (first part of the URL).
Questions to ask:
Are sources documented with footnotes or links?
§ Where did the author get the information?
§ If there are links to other pages as sources, are they reliable sources?
§ Do the links work?
Are there links to other resources on the topic?
§ Are the links well chosen, well-organized, and/or evaluated/annotated?
§ Do the links work?
§ Do the links represent other viewpoints?
§ Do the links (or absence of other viewpoints) indicate a bias?
4. What do others say?
Techniques for Web evaluation:
§ Look up the author’s name in Google or Yahoo.
What do others say about the author or responsible authoring body?
§ “Googling” someone can be revealing and give additional information about the author or the author’s point of view. (You may think the information you found on a particular website is fascinating and new. After “googling” the author, you find out many people feel the information is very controversial. This new discovery may change your view.)
5. Does it all add up?
Techniques for Web evaluation:
§ Step back and think about all you have learned about the page. Listen to your gut reaction. Think about why the page was created and the intentions of its author.
§ Be sensitive to the possibility that you could be the victim of irony, spoof, fraud, or other falsehoods.
§ Ask yourself if the Internet is truly the best place to find resources for your research. Sometimes it may be best to look elsewhere.
Questions to ask:
Why was the page put on the web?
§ Inform, give facts, and give data?
§ Explain, persuade?
§ Sell, entire?
§ Share?
§ Disclose?
Might it be ironic? Satire or parody?
§ Think about the “tone” or attitude of the page.
§ Is it humorous? A parody?
§ Are there outrageous photographs?
§ It is easy to be fooled and this can make you look foolish if you don’t realize it.
So why go to all this effort?
The Internet is a fantastic place to find information for a research paper. The amount of information available is never-ending and very quick to obtain. However, because the World Wide Web is easy, inexpensive, unregulated and often unmonitored (in the United States, that is), it can be very easy for someone to publish incorrect or completely untrue information. In the same way that you carefully read food labels to make sure you are eating healthy or check product information to make sure the goods you are purchasing and using are quality, it is necessary to use those same techniques when browsing the Internet.