Matters of content, authorship, reliability, validity, and the links that further validate the site are some of the concerns in evaluating a website. While researching my project, I repeatedly found what at first seemed to be legitimate examples of educational research. However, when opening these sites, I all too often found biased information based upon the testing of products associated with specific manufacturers. This was not always obvious, as what appeared to be research was under the guise of advertising, and at times, manufacturer's logos and addresses were well hidden within fine text at the bottom of the page or on linking pages.

While these products might be proven to be effective in many special education settings, unbiased research was difficult to find. Along with the advertiser's claims for "cures" for specific disabilities, came high price tags for programs, as well as necessary seminars and workshops in order to make use of the programs.

Authorship of sites is critical to authentic information. The ability to critically read the web (Actvity 5), using a variety of evaluations is essential to training young minds in grasping factual vs. biased data. Website access (Activity 10) for special needs can be assessed by specific web evaluators, such as "Bobby", in order to allow for meaningful and informative teaching. Furthermore, the ability to assess emerging technologies (Activity 7), which include software programs, can and should be through unbiased links such as the Open Directory. Students from elementary to college age will benefit from understanding Policy issues (Activity 11) in order to learn how credibility, commercialism, and copyright can aide in separating fact from fiction. In doing research, the above activities allowed for better understanding of my own project, along with giving me more discernment on the sites I was viewing.

I have included two sites for basic evaluation of web material. The first, on "Advertising and Sponsorship on the Web", gives the viewer a checklist for appraising any conflict of information on commercial sites. The second, "Evaluating Quality", helps searchers judge information, and web content developers provide reliable accessible and factual sites.  Both sites have been entered in the editors page for Open Directory: opendir - 4742e5b04dc5d7665e8610f5f991c1bf.
 
 

Serious conflicts of interest can arise between the self-interests of advertisers and
sponsors and the objectivity of the information provided on a Web page. With this in
mind, the following questions can help you determine if and to what extent advertisers
and sponsors may be influencing the information presented on the page.
 

Question #1: Can You Identify the Type of Advertising or Sponsorship Present?

Types of Advertising
a.Commercial
b.Institutional
c.Advocacy
d.Word of mouth

Types of Sponsorship
a.Nonprofit
b.Institutional

Question #2: Can You Identify the Information Provider?
If Uncertain:

Does the URL provide clues?
Do trademarks or copyright statements provide clues?
Is there a link to the organization responsible for the information?

Question #3: Can You Identify the Advertisers and Sponsors for the Page?
If Uncertain:

Does the URL provide clues?
Do trademarks or copyright statements provide clues?
Is an advertiser given as the contact for the page?

Question #4: Can you Determine the Relationship Between the Advertisers or
Sponsors and the Information?

Are the information and advertising provided by different organizations?
OR
Are the information provider and advertiser or sponsor the same organization?

Question #5: Can you Identify any Possible Conflicts of Interest Between the
Information Provider and the Advertiser or Sponsor?

What is the purpose for providing the information?

Is the information provided related to a product or service?
Who is the advertiser's target audience (e.g., age group, gender, etc.)?

Question #6: Is there a blending of information, entertainment, and advertising
on the page?

Is the page merely an infomercial?
If so, caveat emptor!

Question #7: Are There Web Features That Make it More Difficult to
Determine the Objectivity of the Information?
 
 

Web Feature #1: Hypertext Links
Do hypertext links make differentiating information from advertising more
difficult?

Web Feature #2: Collection of Marketing Data via the Web
Is marketing data collected under the guise of providing personalized
information?
Is marketing data collected under the guise of offering access to more
information?

Web Feature #3: Frames
Does the advertiser use persistent frames to continue to promote a product
even while the user follows links to other sites?

Whether you are searching for information on the nets or putting up your own information for others to access, it is important to consider the quality of the information and its presentation. The Internet is criticized with good reason for the sheer volume of unevaluated information that it possesses. To use information with any confidence, you must be able to critically evaluate how good that information is. A large portion of the information made available on the nets lacks good indications of its quality. It is not enough for information to be of high quality. For others to make use of the information, they must be able to judge the quality for themselves. Information that is well presented makes the quality determination easy for the searcher.

There are several questions you should ask yourself to judge the quality of information that you find? If you can't answer these questions, the quality of the information is doubtful. We will consider each of these in turn:

Is the information accurate?

Is the author an authority on the subject?

Does the author bring any biases in posting the information?

Is the information current and timely?

How does this information compare with other sources on the same topic?

And one more question that can help you find quality information:

Where can I find information that is already evaluated?

Is the information accurate?

If the information is factual, not opinion, the basic question is whether the facts are accurate. Unless the information appears in a refereed journal subject to peer review, you are depending on the authority and expertise of the author and the sources the information is drawn from. Are the sources of the information clearly given? If the information is drawn from the writer's own experience, was it based on simple observation or on carefully designed research? Is the author drawing conclusions and generalizations based on his or her experience, and are they appropriate? Is the information consistent internally and externally with other sources. Is the information well written, well organized, and logically presented? Is it free from spelling and grammatical errors, which may indicate some care in its presentation.

Is the author an authority on the subject?

Do you know who the author of the information is? An unsigned piece of information does not have the authority of a signed piece. If it is unsigned, is it posted in a usually authoritative place? For example, you would be more likely to credit a factual piece in the New York Times, a journal that can be expected to check its sources, than you would on an advertising page. If the author is known, what do you know about the author? Is the author an expert either in the subject matter or alternatively in observation and evaluation? What can you tell about the author? A student does not have the authority of a professor. An unknown writer does not have the authority of a well known, frequently published writer.

Note that one place to look for the author is in meta tags. Meta tags are a form of metadata (information about information) that may be included within the unseen HEAD structure of an HTML page. They are more often missing than present, but if they are included, they are a sign that the author took some care to make the information easier to find by search engines. If you View Source with your browser, you can examine the HEAD section and look for meta tags. The most common tags give descriptions and keywords, but they may also include the author, copyright status, copyright information, dates of publication, and much more. Well written meta tags add credibility to the information.

Does the author bring any biases in posting the information?

Can you judge the author's purpose in posting the information? If the author or the location's purpose is to persuade you or sell to you, you must judge the information accordingly. An evaluation of features of competing software packages is questionable if it is posted on one of the competing software manufacturers' pages. It is more credible if it is posted by a truly independent laboratory. It may be questionable in a magazine or journal supported by advertisers of the products.

Think of the problem of finding unbiased information about a political candidate. It is a role traditionally given to journalists, but many news sources have a political bias, which may extend beyond the obvious editorials. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that sources with which you tend to agree are more apt to be accurate and unbiased.

Is the information current and timely?

Is the information dated or can you tell from the content when it was written? Is the information likely to change? Is it recent enough? If no dates are visible, check for meta tags, as described above.

How does this information compare with other sources on the same topic?

Don't stop with a single source unless you can answer the above questions to your satisfaction. Is there a better source available? Consider varying your approach to searching for relevant information.

Where can I find information that is already evaluated?

While the brute force approaches of using the big search engines like AltaVista and HotBot can dig out a lot of information available on a topic, it can be an overwhelming task to evaluate all the information that is produced or even to make your way through it all. Refining your search can narrow the choices, and you hope that the algorithms that the search engines use to rank items will approximate your needs and put the best results near the top of the lists. This is not always the case, and no matter how good the search engines are, they never index more than a minority of the pages on the nets.

To make searching for quality more productive, it can be useful to make use of expert work done by others. Instead of searching for the basic information, search for an expert in the subject who has posted his or her own information or posted links to evaluated information. The novice often makes the mistake of trying to post as many links as possible on a topic. The expert links to quality, not quantity.

How do you find experts? There are several approaches.

One is to pick out a few best hits from a search engine and follow the links in those documents to look for experts on the sources.

Another is to use the subject matter indexes such as Yahoo and Lycos' Best of the Net, where, presumably some selectivity has been used in listings. Be cautious, though. Their definition of quality will not always agree with your needs.

A still better approach is to use the Argus Clearinghouse, which consists of collections of evaluated Internet resources devoted to a topic.

Another is to restrict your search to scholarly, refererred journals. This will generally require searching for a fee in such services as Dialog, SearchBank, Lexis/Nexis, Pro-Quest Direct, and Uncover.

The search engine Northern Light indexes the full text of about 3400 journals in addition to indexing the Internet. The search is free, and the full text of journal articles is generally available for $1 to $4 apiece.

With any of these, check the dates carefully. Resources collected by an expert may be of marginal value if they haven't been updated for two years.

The real message of this article is not to give a set of rules for evaluation. Search engines work imperfectly on a set of rules. What we really need is to ask everyone to develop critical thinking when confronted by decisions like these. What are the most critical factors to look at when you do a search? And if you are publishing your own web pages, what do you need to consider to ensure that others will realize the quality in your contributions.

For a more thorough treatment of quality evaluation by a respected librarian and author, see Hope Tillman's Evaluating Quality on the Net.

If you want quality in your own web pages, read the companion articles in the Publishing on the Web Forum. They will help you prepare quality, searchable information that others will find and link to. See

Producing Quality Web Page Content

Creating Quality Web Page Design

Producing Quality Content