The Bad
The bad news is that the Internet also leads to a lot of information that is completely inappropriate for your research, and it takes time and skill to weed this out.
The quality of information on the Internet
As things stand the Internet has no standard system of quality control so it's important to be careful about which information you use and not to trust everything you read.
Think about it - the Internet links millions of computers:
- Anyone can put something on the Internet - an amateur or an expert
- From anywhere in the World - be it the United Kingdom or Uruguay
- They can say anything they like - be it true or false
- And leave it there as long as they like - even if it goes out of date
- Or change it without warning - perhaps even remove it completely
There is a danger that the information you find on the Internet will:
- Be from a source that is unreliable, lacking in authority or credibility
- Have content that is invalid, inaccurate, out-of-date
- Not be what it seems!
Weeding out poor quality information takes time
Most people use very simple search techniques when they want to find information on the Internet using a search engine such as Google.
These can produce thousands if not millions of web sites to explore: some information will be useful, some will be useless – it’s up to you to discern which is which!
It can take considerable time and skill to sift through search engine results and evaluate which are the best sources.
Although it may seem a quick and easy option to turn to a search engine for your research, it might be more effective to turn to web services designed specifically for university and college research such as your library web site.
It’s easy to miss key information
If you want to find something on the Internet, you go to a search engine, as they contain everything that is available online, right? Wrong!
Search engines only cover a proportion of what is available online, a lot of information is hidden or invisible to them. For example, some of the databases of research literature that we discussed earlier will not appear in search engine results, especially if they require a subscription or password to get access.
It’s also worth remembering that search engines only search information that is online, and of course a huge body of research literature is still only available in print form in books and journals.
If you try doing the same search in different search engines you will get a different set of results on each search engine – which reveals that none of them index the whole Internet.
Try this to compare search engines
Try a search in Metacrawler [ http://www.metacrawler.com ] to see how the results differ across search engines ...
Notice how they list some of the same sites but not all - and in a slightly different order?
It's a common misconception that search engines (such as Google) search everything - they don't - so if you rely on them alone you may miss some of the key sources for your research - consider using other sources too, such as your library catalogue, other databases and academic web search tools.
