Apple Technology Review, Fall 1997: Spotlight

Searching the WWW, page 7

Check References.An enormous problem with the WWW is knowing how to evaluate the goodness or acceptability of an article you might find with a search engine. After all, the Web is not a refereed place: anyone with a few dollars can create a Web site with any kind of random content. What can you do to get some sense of believability?

Example: If you do a search such as:

Holocaust victims

you'll get a very large number of hits, some of which are from Holocaust survivors, while others are from World War II revisionist sites. A good technique for evaluating the documents is to look at citations using link:<site> search in Alta Vista. The link:foobar.org filter from Alta Vista shows you what other sites link to this location. By following a few of the links (probably using the multiple windows described earlier), you can quickly get a sense for who believes the claims of this site and who doesn't.

Use other Sources.As you visit places on the Net, keep in mind those that have search facilities you might use later. For instance, Amazon.com is a very handy place to look up book titles and related books on a subject. In some ways, it gives a valuable adjunct to regular library services.

Use MELVYL. To bring the story full circle, a valuable resource to remember is the MELVYL library system at http://www.dla.ucop.edu/. This service lets you have access to much of the collected library materials at the University of California. Although the interface is quaint (it runs over a telnet connection), it's a very valuable adjunct to have. I use it frequently to find an author's full name or correct spelling or to get a list of coauthors and related terms that describe what I might use in a Web search. Professional UC librarians run MELVYL, and it shows. As a consequence of building large indexing systems for both electronic systems and those based on paper, they run a tight, well-structured, credible, and valuable database.

Those card catalogs really were a wonderful thing. I remember many happy hours cruising through the big wooden racks, seeing small, cryptic notes written in the margins and wondering what that was all about. Still, I'm glad I don't have to maintain a few million cards in them, and I'm certain that the Library of Congress is happy to be out of the business of pushing all those paper molecules around as well. I keep the memories, but use the search tools.

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