Evaluating Sites

COMP1260 > Using the Internet

Introduction Surfing the web can take you to a lot of different websites and knowing which are legitimate can be difficult. Knowing how to evaluate websites can make your web surfing experience safer and information gathering more reliable.

...by students The Wrong Website When I was in high school I was looking for some code online. I had been doing some leisure programming and was stopped on a task, so I went to the web for help. After following link after link trying to hunt down what I thought was a solution, I found myself at a URL that was pretty random and didn't have much to do with programming. Before I could even hit the back button in my browser, my anti-virus had informed me of a Trojan Horse Virus that had infected my computer. This was the first time I started taking evaluating web sites seriously.

Why is Evaluating Sites Important?

Evaluating websites is important for two main reasons.

Security is the first reason why you would want to evaluate a website. Viruses are not only in executable files anymore; they are becoming more and more common on websites as well. Websites that may contain viruses include torrent related sites and websites containing adult content. These viruses can be anything from key loggers to programs that crash your computer. Key loggers are programs that keep a log of all the keystrokes you make on your keyboard and relay them back to a source. If you use your computer to perform online banking or you use your credit card number on your computer, you can imagine how dangerous key loggers can be. This is the first reason why evaluating websites is so important.

The second reason why evaluating a website is important is for reliability. Imagine you are citing a website as a source for an essay you are writing. You want the information you are gathering to be accurate, but how to you if it is accurate?

How to Evaluate a Website

The following are some of the things you can look for when evaluating a website.

• The URL - The URL is the address of the website at the top of your browser. For example, the URL of this page is http://wiki.cs.umanitoba.ca/mediawiki/index.php/Evaluating_Sites. The URL can tell you a lot about a website. For example, if you were looking for information on NASA and a search engine gave www.nasa.gov and www.i-will-give-you-viruses.com, which one would you choose? In this example the choice is obvious, but sometimes it can be hard to determine a safe site from a harmful site.
  

• 3rd Party Tools - Site advisors such as McAfee's SiteAdvisor, can help weed out malicious websites before you access them.

• The Author - Determining if a web page has an author can help determine the reliability of a web page's information.

• The Date of Publication - The date of publication may be important to evaluating the site as well.

• Cited Information - Much like the author of a web page, it is important to the reliability of the website that the information found there is cited. If you are citing a web page for an assignment you are doing, you want the information to be accurate. If a web page does not cite sources for its information, it can be hard to trust that information.

• Intended Audience - The intended audience is important in evaluating a site as well, as some sites may be very bias and opinionated towards a subject. Sites may also be satirical or are set up as a parody of the given content, making their intended audience entirely different from people who may take the site seriously.

Accessing Journal Articles

Accessing journal articles can be done through the University of Manitoba's online libraries. You can access these articles with the following steps:

1. Go to the University of Manitoba's homepage.
2. From the top menu, select The University and then Libraries from the drop down menu.
3. You will see six brown title bars, the first being Find Articles, Books.... Under this block you will see >> more; Click it.
4. Select the first link, UofM Google Scholar under Getting Started.

The Google Scholar Homepage.

Finding journal articles is as easy as that. The google scholar page that is brought up will allow you to search for any journal articles that the University of Manitoba has access to. You can determine if you are using Google Scholar through the UofM by looking at the URL. If you followed the instructions correctly, the URL should end with .lib.umanitoba.ca.

References

Cornell University Library. http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/webeval.html

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