Finding Web Sites You Can Trust

When you conduct an online search and end up with thousands of web sites on your topic, how do you winnow the results to one you can trust?

Google puts out a newsletter for librarians to help them in their work, and the most recent issue contains a brief article in it by Karen G. Schneider who also writes for the Librarians' Internet Index--Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust. Schneider identifies five benchmarks:

1. Availability: To determine if information "behind the wall" is worth your time and/or money, skim the web site's mission statement, "About" page, or registration sign-up page. For example, the Ellis Island Foundation makes it clear that by registering for free, you'll be able to take full advantage of the site's functionality.
2. Credibility: Look for an "About" page or an author biography.
3. Authorship: If you think a web site has more than the average number of typos, copy a representative page and dump it into a Word document for a spell-check.
4. External Links: Look for evidence that the web site maintains its links, such as notes indicating when a page was last updated, and beware of student project web sites and personal web pages with many, many links!
5. Legality: Trust your instincts. If a web site looks and feels like a rip-off, it probably is. Take a chunk of its text and paste it into Google to see if it shows up elsewhere.

Then Schneider tosses in a bonus set of questions to help a researcher dig deeper:

1. Does the author provide sources for information?
2. If the site provides opinion rather than facts, are these opinions clearly identifiable as such?
3. Who are the audiences for this site? Is the site appropriate for the intended audiences?
4. Does the point of view provide balance to the information seeker?
5. How does the site compare with other sites on the same subject?