Evaluating the Web
Annotation
“Basic Search Tips and Advanced Boolean Explained” is a guide - presumably for University of California, Berkeley, students - on conducting effective web searches. The resource, a PDF file, was found on the afore-mentioned University’s library website, and references a “course”. The author is a university librarian, and may be considered a very credible source of information, which is relevant to my purpose, since it provides objective information on how to use conditional operators in Web searches.
The guide does not detail all aspects of Web searching, eschewing information on advanced search engine options and the commonly implemented Site operators (such as “define”, “cache”, “site” and so on). But as the document only claims to cover basic searching and advanced Boolean, the credibility of the document is not diminished for this omission.
The guide unfortunately does not specify a publication date. One may assume that searching techniques would remain relatively constant, but this is not a given, and searching for additional material that provides surety of currency is recommended.
Google reports that 12 sites link directly to this document, including other educational institutions. This is a good indication of the guide’s perceived quality.
Discussion
I enjoyed conducting this evaluation and believe the Evaluating Web Sites tutorial to be a particularly helpful framework for considering the validity of published material.
In general, people - including me - find it easy to defer to Google: whose premise is that the more links a webpage has, the more authority it carries (there are other factors, too, but it is generally thought that a link counts as a vote for relevance). Naturally, Google’s calculation is automated, and there are many reasons a page may receive many links and a consequently high placing on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), so a good heuristic for evaluating Web-sourced information is important, particularly in “mission-critical” applications.
Depending on the type of resource, I think that in most cases people would be happier to click on a link surrounded by good contextual data than to read my annotation. It would take less time to click the link and scan the first part of the document than to read through my thoughts on the matter.
Additional Resource: