Internet

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.0 Introduction 2
1.1 Internet as a source of information 2
1.2 Different ways of searching the internet2
1.3 How to identify quality information 5
1.4 Conclusion 6
References7

1.0 INTRODUCTION
The Internet has information from all over the world. It is important to develop skills to evaluate any information found on the internet. Unlike books, journals and other resources that have been evaluated by scholars, publishers and librarians, this is not the case for information on the internet. Anyone can write on theweb, from different authors, different qualities and different sources. This essay identifies different ways of identifying useful and accurate sources from the internet.

1.1 INTERNET AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION
The Internet can be defined as the result of many technologies such as computing, time-sharing of computer, packet-switching, many visionaries and great technical thinkers comingtogether over a period of decade (Hock, 2007:2).
Information is a data of value in decision making which has the potential to transfer a state of knowledge. Electronic information sources are problematic because of the potential to continually change or delete information (Cooke, 1999:13).
Good quality information from the internet can be identified dependent upon the needs of the individual seekingthe information and the nature of the source being evaluated (Cooke, 1999: 52).
“As a general rule, the greater the number of resources covered by a search tool, the less selective the guide is in terms of the quality of the materials included in it, and the less descriptive information there is likely to be” (Cooke, 1999: 49).
1.2 DIFFERENT WAYS OF SEARCHING THE INTERNET
The Internet can besearched using several web finding tools. These tools are available in finding what our needs are and each tool does things a little differently with a different purpose and emphasis as well as a different coverage and search features (Hock, 2007:7).
Different facilities are available in searching for accurate and useful information from the internet. In relation to information gotten from theinternet, Quality is often used to refer to sources which contain original content, accurate and reliable (Cooke, 1999:14).
A variety of tools used to search the internet are (1) Search Engines (2) Subject Catalogues and Directories (3) Reviewing and Rating Services (4) Subject-Based Gateway Services and Virtual Libraries ( Cooke, 1999:18).
Search Engines: A search engine is a tool that lets youexplore database containing the text from tens of millions of web pages (Glossbrenner, 1999: 5).This is the most popular means of finding information on the internet. Search Engines are sometimes called spiders, robots or crawlers are automatically generated database of www sites and pages. When locating high quality information, they are the least advantageous due to the fact that they do notdiscriminate between the qualities of the materials which are indexed. Examples of search engines are Excite, Lycos and AltaVista (Cooke, 1999:19).
The Search engine consists of three major parts: a) the spider which insists which pages, reads and indexes them b) the database also sometimes called the catalogue which contains a copy of every web page that the spider finds c) The search engine, the...