Both the power and the pitfalls of doing research on the Internet relate to the importance of knowing how to evaluate sources properly. The Internet makes research easier in some ways and more difficult in others. Through Internet search engines such as Google and Bing, you have immediate access to a great deal of free information. Keep in mind that many of the entries on any topic are not valid sources for serious research, and the order of the search results is determined not by their importance but by search formulas that depend both on popularity and on who pays for Web pages to be on the top of the list. Anybody can put up a Web site, which means you can’t always be sure of the Web site owner’s credibility and reliability. A Web source may be written by anyone—a fifth grader, a famous professor, a professional society, or a person with little knowledge about the topic.

Some students might at first be excited about receiving 243,000,000 hits from a Google search on global warming, but they may be shocked when they realize the information they find is not sorted or organized. Think carefully about the usefulness of the information based on three important factors: relevance, authority, and bias.