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Searching
the Internet and Evaluating the Resources Found
The Internet can be a useful resource for locating information to use in your research paper. However, the Internet poses unique problems for doing research. Caution: Unlike library catalogs and online databases which index material produced by publishers, most material on the Internet has not gone through the editorial process. Therefore you must take special care in determining the quality and authenticity of a Web site. Don't rely on the Internet to be your main resource in researching a topic. If you focus your research efforts in standard print sources and use the Internet after you have mastered the search process, you will be better prepared to research future assignments successfully. World Wide Web
To locate information on the World Wide Web you must use special Web indexes. Although there are numerous Web indexes in existence, we will focus on two of the more popular commercial ones in this Tutorial (if you go to the Williams Library Home Page you can access other Web indexes). The first Web index that we will demonstrate is named Yahoo! and is known as a Web directory. The second is Google, which is an example of a Web search engine. We will explain the differences between Web directories and Web search engines later. One thing to know about Web indexes is that no one Web index catalogs the entire Internet. A recent study done by Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Guiles of the NEC Research Institute, and published in Nature magazine, found that most of the major Web search engines index less than 10 percent of the Web. And only about a total of 42 percent of the Web has been indexed. They found that Northern Light search engine indexed 16% of the Web, Snap 15.5%, AltaVista 15.5%, Hotbot 11.3% and Yahoo 7.4%. They also report that the majority of Web sites indexed are commercial sites--comprising 62.1% of the sites indexed. School and education sites make up 6%, Health 2.8%, Personal 2.3%, Societies 1.9%, Pornography 1.5%, Community 1.4%, Government 1.2% and Religion 0.8%. These findings are important because they indicate that many Web sites are literally lost in cyberspace. If Web sites are not indexed they will not be found by searchers. "The study also underscores a little-understood feature of the Internet. While many users believe Web pages are automatically available to the search programs employed by such sites as Yahoo, Excite, and AltaVista, the truth is that finding, identifying and categorizing new Web pages requires a great expenditure of time, money and technology" (Los Angeles Times). We'll start with a demonstration of Yahoo!
History of Yahoo! Yahoo! started as an idea, grew into a hobby and then turned into a full-time passion. The chief Yahoos, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their guide in April 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they found their home-brewed lists were becoming too long and unwieldy. Gradually they began to spend more and more time on Yahoo! During 1994 they converted Yahoo! into a customized database designed to serve the needs of the thousands of users who began to use the service through the closely bound Internet community. They developed customized software to help efficiently locate, identify and edit material stored on the Internet. The name Yahoo! is supposed to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos. Yahoo! itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "akebono," while the search engine was lodged on Filo's computer "konishiki" (both machines were named after legendary Hawaiian sumo wrestlers). From these humble beginnings, Yahoo! has grown to become the world's favorite guide to the Internet. As more and more of the world goes on-line, Yahoo! is one of the most popular destinations for exploring or researching on the World Wide Web. Taken from the history of Yahoo! page located on the AKA Marketing.com server.Browsing Yahoo! Yahoo!, like the Web itself, is too large to be explored entirely link by link. To facilitate browsing for information Yahoo has divided its Web site into subject categories. These subject categories are similar to Library of Congress Subject Headings. Yahoo starts with broad subject categories and takes you to narrower and related subject areas. You can browse Yahoo by clicking on the various categories listed on each page. You can search Yahoo by entering a word (or a few words) into the search box that appears on every page in the directory. Combine the two strategies and you can "browse and then search" or "search and then browse." The subject categories are what make Yahoo a Web directory. In addition to basic Web searching, Yahoo offers access to news and sports stories, entertainment reviews, stock quotes, as well as white and yellow pages. In this Tutorial we will focus on the Web searching aspect of Yahoo The Web pages indexed by Yahoo have all been submitted by the Web page designers themselves, or are added by the Yahoo indexers. While it is a much smaller Web index than most of the others, Yahoo is better organized and easier to use than some of the larger Web search engines. Let's take a look at the Yahoo start page. Notice that the page is divided into a number sections and provides a space for users to enter keywords to search. Yahoo provides many services to users including free email. Directly under the search box are links to maps, white and yellow pages, and other items of commercial interest. Yahoo also has a category called "My Personal Yahoo!" that allows you to customize Yahoo to reflect your personal interests. Take time to explore these options using your home computer.
For this lesson we will pretend that you are writing a research paper on African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement. When using the Yahoo directory we must first determine into which broad subject category our topic fits. We have a number of possible choices. If we look at the categories in the graphic above we should be able to make an educated guess as where to start. First, consider which academic disciplines might study the Civil Rights Movement. If we guess history, sociology, or political science we would be right. Now, what academic discipline do historians, sociologists and political scientists share in common? Social Science would be a correct answer. However, just so you know, history is a bit of a problem. Some people consider history to be a part of the humanities while others consider it a social science. For our purposes we will choose the "Social Science" link in Yahoo When we click on the "Social Science" link in Yahoo we will see the following:
This is a list of the sub-categories under the "Social Science" link. Each sub-category further defines the Social Sciences. If we look at the lower left column of the graphic we see a link for "History@." Because there is not a category on this page for the Civil Rights Movement we will click on "History@," as that seems the most likely choice. The @ symbol indicates that the History sub-category is actually located under another subject category in Yahoo. Yahoo has cross listed History under Social Sciences because it assumes that people might look under the Social Science link for history resources. When we click on "History@" we see the following:
Look at the top of the graphic. Notice the line: Home > Arts > Humanities >. This means that the History category is located under the Arts and Humanities category in Yahoo. As we said above, some people consider History a part of the humanities and others consider it a social science. Yahoo has chosen to place history in the humanities but created a cross-reference to the category from the social sciences. Scrolling down the History page we see the following categories:
There are many options to choose from. One logical choice would be to select the By Time Period option. However, we are interested in a specific time period in United States history, not world history. Since we are looking at the broad History categories it would make better sense to first select the U.S. History link. Notice that there are 4472 web pages listed under this category, some of which are newly added to Yahoo. When we click on the U.S. History link we see the following:
We now see more categories and a listing of the Most Popular Sites under the U.S. History category. From the choices we are given it now makes sense to select the By Time Period link. When we click on the By Time Period link we see the following:
The next logical choice is the category 20th Century. Clicking on that category shows us the following:
We now see a category for the Civil Rights Movement. Clicking on the link we see:
Here we finally see links to Civil Rights Movement Web sites. Notice that there are a number of interesting sites. If we click on the "National Civil Rights Museum" link we will be taken to that Web site. It appears as follows:
Now that we are at an actual Web site we can look around and see what is there. We will need to determine if the Web site is credible and who is responsible for producing or authoring the site. If we decide to use information from the Web site we will also need to write down the address (URL) of the Web site. Let's examine the above Web site more closely for the information that we will need. First let's determine who wrote or produced this page. This Web page uses frames. Frames divide the page into sections that act independently of each other. The left frame of this page provides a navigation menu. If we click on the "About the Museum" button we should get information about the museum.
The Museum has provided us with information about itself which will help us determine the credibility of the site. In addition to the "About the Museum" page there is also a button for "About this Site." If we click on this button we see the following:
Here we have additional information about this specific Web site. The Web site is sponsored and hosted by ROAD RUNNER of the Mid-South which is a division of Time Warner Communications. However, the author of the site content is the National Civil Rights Museum. The Museum should be listed as the author in a bibliography. To take a look at the actual contents of the site we click on the "Interactive Tour" link.
This is the first page of a multi-page tour covering the history of the Civil Rights Movement. This Web site has a wealth of information. If you cite this page in a research paper bibliography you would also need to know the Web page address, or URL. The Web page address is located in the "Location Bar" of the Web browser. We have not included this bar in the previous graphics to save space. Take a look at next graphic and you will see the Location Bar.
The address, or URL, of this page is <http://www.midsouth.rr.com/civilrights/>. The ".com" part of the address means that this Web site is on a commercial Web server. We will cover citing Web pages in Lesson 6.
When you are done proceed to the Using the Yahoo! Search Option lesson.      |
Now that we have finished the browsing Yahoo lesson try browsing Yahoo
yourself. Go to the