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Look Before You Link - URLs

The books and periodicals that you access in a university or college library are organized and screened for reliability by librarians. But what if you are looking for information on the World Wide Web? The Web is a great place to find information, but the information is not organized, and the sources of information are not always credible or useful. Anyone with a little server space can put out information or misinformation. It is essential, then, to lean how to access and screen materials you find on the Web to ensure that you are, in fact, accessing accurate data.

How do you discern reliable and unreliable sources on the Internet? And more specifically, how do you know which sources would be best to use in a research paper or essay? Before you visit a site, there are some ways of evaluating its usefulness for your purpose. As you peruse the links listed on your search results page, try to eliminate sites before you visit them.

First, you should be very clear as to your teacher's instructions regarding acceptable and unacceptable sources. If your instructor is familiar with the Web, then she will probably have some guidelines for you to follow. For example, she might stipulate that for this project you may not use personal home pages or that you may not use sites sponsored by advocacy organizations, although perhaps those sources would be valid for a different kind of project. Second, you will need to have a clear focus of the nature of your project, for that will determine the types of sources that you will use.

Although not a sure-fire way to check the validity of a source, a trick to help you sift through the results page of a Web query is to check the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for information about the site's source. (For tips and tricks on conducting searches, read Online Research: Navigating Through Cyberspace.) Each URL has a couple of basic parts just like a residential address. Think of it as a postal address strung together without any spaces. The three main components of a URL are the protocol, the domain, and the path. Sometimes the file type is indicated as well.

The protocol of the URL indicates how the information is stored. The most common protocol you will be working with in a Web search is http (hypertext transfer protocol), but you might also encounter gopher (a menu file retrieval service), telnet (to log on to a remote computer) and ftp (file transfer protocol) sources as well. Not too long ago, you would have needed a separate program to access gopher, ftp, and sites with other protocols; now you can access most of them with your Web browser.

The domain indicates the organization, and the domain suffix indicates the type of organization. In the near future, domain names will probably expand and change to accommodate increased Web size. For now, the most common domain endings are .gov, .com, .org, .net, and .edu. Domain names that end in .gov are U.S. government sites; .org sites are nonprofit organizations; .com and .net usually indicate commercial sites or sites that support personal home pages; .edu indicates educational sites in the United States. You can tell a lot about a site before you visit it, then, just by looking at the domain.

Don't just trust or mistrust a site, though, because it has a particular domain name. Just because a URL has .edu in it doesn't necessarily make it a valid research source. You might find student hypertext projects or student home pages that might provide you with helpful links to scholarly or credible sources, but you won't want to use a student home page as a source in your research paper. On the other hand, don't mistrust a .com site just because it is commercial. Look at the domain for the address of this site, for example. Many commercial sites are devoted to communicating pertinent and important information to the public. But looking before you link is a good way to avoid frustration as you search for information.

The path indicates the location of the Web page on the server. It is possible that the file name and type will be indicated as well. To put it all together, examine the following URL:

http://www.blinncol.edu/disted/tips.html

HTTP indicates the language (hypertext), blinncol.edu is the domain name (an educational site), the path or part of the server that hosts the file is disted, and the file name is tips. The .html extension indicates that this file is a Web page.

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