While in many ways the above quote is true, there are skills that can make the internet a lot more manageble so that it can be used as an effective tool for research.

The challenge was once creating a knowlege product, such as a report, with the limited information that was available in a schools. The internet has erased that challenge by priding access to the largest collection of human knowledge that has ever existed. While information indexed in a library is virtually assured to be of high quality and accuracy, the internet contains copious amounts of misinformation as well as information based on peronal opinion, political agenda, and fraudulant intentions. How do we sort the good from the bad?

Think you already know? Try these web pages. Do they contain useful information, or are they just scams and junk?

Getting Started

Identify the Information You Seek Before You Begin
This is probably he most important advice I have for students doing research on the internet. To put it simply, plan your search.What do you hope to find?  If your topic is the Civil War, what is it about the civil war? (Dates, leaders, weapons, maps, battles, causes, effects) Decide what is important to your inquiry and look for that specifically.

Choose Your Search Search Engine Carefully
Resisit the temptation to vist the butlers website and simply type in your question. Not only will it not be answered, you will likely be directed to websites that are trying to sell you something. There are a number of websites that will help you find what you need but they all will return results based on the searh term the users enter.

Google is the most popular search site, but returns results based on popularity. This means great sites don't get a lot of trafic will not be returned to you no matter how relvant they are to your search. When doing research on the internet, you don't want a site just because it has a lot of visitors

For assistance in choosing the right search engine for your needs vist NoodleTools 

Develop a List of Keywords
Do not enter an entire sentence or question.
Always avoid using common words (example "the" "but" "is")
Choose a few keywords that are associaed with your topic and use them in different combinations

For example: if I was looking for information on why civil war battles were so deadly, my keywords might be civil war, casualies, medical care, deaths , etc

Then I might search for "civil war weapons", or "civil war medical care" or "civil war casualties"

Be Cautious of the Read/Write Web.
Not long ago people could only read web pages, but more and more webpages can be edited by multple users. In the most extreme example of this phenominon, Wikipedia, anyone can edit any article they wish. Of course the danger in this is that is that they can put in whatever information want. . For my class you may use Wikipedia and other sites in the read/write web for research, but make sure the information is verified by another source you have cited. Often Wikipedia and other sites on the read/write web are good starting points but never let your research project rest entirely on these sources.

Truncate URLs
If you find a page on a site that looks useful, take the extra time to shorten the url to its most basic form. This will give you a better idea of the qualty of the pages on the site and may also show you other pages in the same site that could also be useful.

For example:
http://www.gemsvt.org/middle/grade8/socialstudies/guidelines.htm would be shortened to http://www.gemsvt.org

Know What the Domains Means 

Domain	What it Means	Who Can Register	As a Research Source
.edu	educational institution	only degree granting colleges and universities	likey to be accurate
.gov	government agencies	only U.S. Govenment agencies	likely to be accurate
.org	nonprofit organization	anyone	often a K-12 school may be registered as a .org as gemsvt.org
.K12.US	K-12 School	only primary and secondary public schools	many teachers publish under these domans and they can be a good souce of information of links to good information
.net	network resource	anyone	often an internet service provider or web hosting company but could be anything use with caution
.com	commercial website	anyone	be cautious, often something is for sale but it could also be a subscriprion site that has valuable information such as Ebsco or Worldbook Online

Do a Whois Lookup to Get More Information About Who Owns a Site  

http://www.domaintools.com/
http://www.whois.net/

See Who Already is Linked to the Site. (If the site is a quality source of information many schools and other have linked to it already)

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Cite Sources
Nobody likes to have their work copied. Everyone likes to be given credit for their work and ideas.  Citing sources on the internet and otherwise has never been an easier task with online tools such as citation machine.

The internet is always changing, I will be adding to this pages as it does...