Evaluating Web Sites

Posted on May 14, 2010

We use the web all the time to quickly gather information - but finding facts and people is only half the battle. How can you evaluate how trustworthy a website is?

There have been plenty of famous scams and spoof websites. Even news organizations as reputable as BBC have been fooled. Finding a great fact or a great expert on the topic you're investigating is not of much use if you cannot be sure how reliable that information is.

Let's look at some basic rules, tips and websites you can use to analyze what you find on the Internet.

Basic Rules

Obviously, if you're visiting the New York Times website or the web pages of the British Museum, you can have a fair degree of confidence in the information. That doesn't mean it's necessarily right or you have to agree with it - but it is sourced and can be verified.

Things get a little murkier when you're dealing with either individual websites - a mother's campaign against the over-use of Ritalin, for example - or a web page maintained by a cause or a political group.

Still, there are universal, basic criteria you can use to evaluate a website.  This listing by researchers at Cornel University provides a handy, five-point checklist:

www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/webcrit.html

They include Accuracy, Authority and Objectivity.
For my purposes, I emphasize two rules of thumb: Currency and Transparency.
Currency is obvious - it means how up-to-date is the website. Unless you're doing an historical study, a website about the politics of Iraq that is dated before the war of 2001 or on the economy of Haiti that has not changed since the earthquake of 2010 is not very useful.

Transparency is harder to discern, but even more important.  I don't care about a website's bias -sometimes, an individual's or group's passion or beliefs can be helpful. What I do care about is that a website is fully transparent about who they are and what they stand for.

For starters, is the creator/author/webmaster easily identified and reachable. Putting an email address like luke@skywalker.com under the heading "Contact Us" does not cut it. I need a real person, with a real name and preferably a phone number as well as an email. If I find some juicy nugget on their page, I want to be able to contact them and check out their source.

Take a look at CorpWatch.org.:

It's a muckraking anti-globalization website with plenty of well-researched articles on various corporate intrigues around the world.  You can agree or disagree with their bias - -that's not the point.  The point is, the website is completely transparent. Click on "About Us" and you get the statement of principles and a history of the group's activism. Click on "Staff" and you get biographies and moiré contact information.

That is precisely the transparency you should look for on all websites.

Who is Behind Page

Even if a website lists some contacts - and especially if it does not - you might want to check out who is really behind the web page.

If you were doing research on Martin Luther King Jr. you might stumble upon this webpage with a seemingly impressive domain registration:

http://martinlutherking.org/

In fact, though, the official website for the revered African-American leader is:

www.thekingcenter.org

The "martinlutherking.org" website is, in fact, run by a white supremacist group called Stormfront. They used to hide their affiliation, though now it is mentioned at the bottom of the page.
If you came across a website about which you had doubts, there are easy tools to use. Every web site has to be registered and the companies that do this want to be sure they get paid. So the owner or "registrant" has to give certain details and those details are stored in databases.  Of course, someone could simply be acting as a front for a group. Also, in many cases, real owners have opted to keep their information private and the domain registration company screens their personal information.
Still, in many cases you will find a real name and usually a phone number or address.
The names of domain owners are listed in what is generally called a "whois" database and various services can search that for you. You'll find some of the best tools listed at JournalismNet's "Who is Behind a Web Page" at:

www.peoplesearchpro.com/journalism/people/whois.htm

I like Geek Tools at  www.geektools.com/whois.php and BetterWhoIs at www.betterwhois.com for their ease of use.

A more detailed analysis can sometimes come from DomainTools at whois.domaintools.com. Put in a website address and you'll get the basic "whois" registry information. For a fee you can also find out about registry changes and the history of ownership.

Then click on the tab "site profile" and a richer picture emerges about the site - such as "related sites" and its entry in Wikipedia.

Alexa

Finally, there is a neat web site called Alexa (at www.alexa.com) which boasts it can help you "discover how popular a site is, to find new sites, to learn who owns a site and a lot more."

On Alexa, you can see a list of the most popular sites in the world, based on global rankings or popular sites by country. Put in any website and the Alexa Traffic Rank will tell you how popular the site is. Do many people visit this site or is it obscure - that can be important to know.

Alexa also provides snapshot descriptions of most sites, contact information on who owns the site and where they are located. The "Online Since" date will tell you how long this site has been operating.

All these tools and tricks won't ensure you'll never be fooled on the web - but they should help you better judge who and what to trust.