Information should be checked?

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The Internet is a very important place for research on various topics. Uploading documents or pages on a web is very easy, cheap and free, unregulated and is unmonitored. You should know that quality of information is not necessarily at hand.

There are principles for close evaluation (monitoring) of anything you find on the net. The decision is up to you to examine the validity, authorship, timeliness and integrity of what you find. Hence, information around us are not verified, and placing a wrong figure could well undermine your credibility.

Recall the false news published in May this year about the death of musician James Blunt. This information got published by many portals, to Blunt commenting on his twitter profile about rumors of his own death, by writing the following: „Not sure if this rumour is true or not, but if so, I can report that the afterlife looks remarkably like London."

Most sites you find through search engines are auto-published, or published by small or large companies in order to persuade you to buy something, or to believe their stands.

Where to start? It is recommended that you start with a variety of search tools, depending on how much and what you know about the topic you're researching, or what you want to find out?

Human Rights Center University of Sarajevo recognizes three types of search tools: 

•  defined search engines
•  defined subject directories
•  contents of databases or invisible web

Defined search engines are made by robots. Containing the full text, every word of web pages they're linking on, they are large and often attract a lot of information, and they are not evaluated.

Defined subject directories are made basing on the selections made by people who use robots or computer programs, organized in categories of cases, never containing the full text of web pages they're linking on (you can search only by what you see), their size varies from specialized small to large, often carefully evaluated and selected.

Contents of databases or "invisible web" are pages that can not be found via search engines and are rarely included within the underlying directories. Unlike it, "visible web" is what you can see using these tools. "Invisible Web" offers more pages.

There are metasearch engines (Ask Jeeves, Ixquick, MetaCrawler, etc..), which look up more than ordinary browsers.

When using them, you type keywords into the search window, and your search transmits simultaneously to several search engines and their databases of web pages. Within a few seconds you get results from all search engines included in your search. Meta search engines do not have a web pages database, but they send your search terms to databases maintained by search engine companies.

Google has the largest database of web pages. Their popularity ranking to the top of search results often appoints websites valuable to look at, but frequently these are the sites that pay for advertising in this way. However, Google is often not enough. It is necessary to seek the opinion of another. 

Here you can find a guide that is a part of internet workshops held at the University of California, which is adapted for us by Human Rights Center University of Sarajevo.