SEARCHING THE INTERNET!
The Internet is a great place to get lots of information. In fact, if you aren't careful you might getinformation overload! When we use the Internet to get information, it's necessary to remember some very important things.
- Anyone can put anything on the Internet, and anyone can say they are an expert, even if they aren't. How can you protect yourself from the fake experts and get information from the real ones? One way is to pay attention to the URL of the website you are visiting. A website that ends in .gov, for example, is a website that belongs to the government.
- Another website ending is .edu, which stands for education.
- Another common ending is .org. At first, .org (for organization) was for non-profit organizations or non-commercial groups, but more recently this is not necessarily true.
- In the same way, .com was originally set up for commercial use.
- There are now many additional domains that people can use to make their URLs. (.info, .tv, other country domains, as well as many more)
- Some free sites let you make a webpage and store it on their site. They usually have a lot of advertisements on the page too. An example of this would be the geocities.com site.
- There are many search engines that can look for information on the Internet. All of them are useful, but I like Google (www.google.com) the best. It uses a special way to decide which sites are the most popular and the most linked by other sites, and it uses that information to help decide which sites will show up first.
- When you search for a site through Google or through other sites, there are also some things to remember. First, always look for the sponsored links note at the top or to the right on the results page. A sponsored link is there because a company paid some money to the search engine to appear on the first page.
- When you search for something, the more precise the information you put in the search box, the better your search will be.
- There's another way you can limit the number of hits. If you put quotation marks around words, it means you want the search engine to find the words together in exactly that order.
- Another helpful way you can search for something is to use the + or - signs.
- One of the websites that often comes out at the top of a search is Wikipedia. A wiki is an on-line discussion that different people can participate in. Each person can make changes and improve whatever is written in the wiki. Wikipedia is an on-line encyclopedia that uses this method to correct and gather information. In general, the information in Wikipedia is as correct as the information in an encyclopedia.
