Reflection #5

I can’t imagine my life without Google.  Since entering college in 1996, I have followed Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, Yahoo!, and now Google.  Whenever I want to search for anything on the web, I bring up Google.  Google is a common word in our household since everyone is fairly computer savvy.  Danielle will ask us what something is, and my common phrase back is ‘Go Google it and see what you find.’  But even though I consider myself pretty computer literate, I did not know the answer to every question on the Information Literacy Quiz.  There were a few questions I did not know like ‘How do you find out who is linked to your school’s Web site?’ and ‘How do you find the history of any given Web site?’  I’m excited to add these tidbits to my bag of tricks, but even though I did not know the answers to these two questions, I still believe I would be able to recognize when a site is authentic versus not through common sense, experience, and skepticism.

For the MAPping Information Activity Technology Project this week I selected the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website to dissect.  At first glance the web URL (www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus) is suspicious because ‘zapatopi’ might be a person’s name.  When analyzing the links embedded in the website, I found that a good majority of the links connected me to somewhere within Lyle Zapato’s personal website.  Other links navigated me over to unbelievable amateur videos capturing various sightings of this Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.  When utilizing the link command, I found there were a number of external websites warning viewers that the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website is a hoax and is not to be believed.  Now my suspicions are pretty much confirmed that this website is not to be believed and should not be used for factual information.

Also, when searching for Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus in Google’s, Yahoo!’s, and Excite’s search engine, all three of these search engines returned pretty much the same URLs.  The first website returned was always the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus’ original website.  The following websites were all sites warning viewers that the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website is a hoax and is not to be believed.  Few advertisements are returned with the search results which makes sense since the search topic is not credible or true.  The advertisements which were returned made no sense and were not relevant to the original search criteria.  When identifying the publisher/author of the website, the www.easywhois.com website returned the registrant, administrative, technical, and billing contact all to be the same person.  And even though the history of the website, which is depicted via www.archive.org, proves the website has been maintained since 2003 and updated quite frequently, it is not enough to prove this site has legitimate and trustworthy information.

In conclusion, even though the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website is a well put together website at first glance and moderately well maintained, its primary use should be to educate our students that not all sites should be believed.  Students need to analyze the site’s content, links, publisher/author, and history to help them determine whether or not the site is to be believed.  If the site is a hoax, then all it’s good for is a couple of laughs.

Some of my favorite sites that I frequently use are www.imdb.com and www.allmusic.com.  Both sites have been around since 1996 and are impressive databases of movies and music respectively.  However, because these sites’ information is user maintained (much like Wikipedia), the viewer needs to read the information with a bit of skepticism.  And when needing more proof, it is always good to compare notes from another source/website.