Finding Reliable Information Online

Book excerpt: We live in an information-saturated environment and spend far too much time searching, surfing, skimming, contributing, and organizing the information in our lives. We spend too little time immersing ourselves in reliable high quality information. We are often so buried in information and strapped for time that we grab information like it was fast food, without bothering to evaluate its quality. Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth uses stories or “information adventures” to illustrate the best approaches to searching for information and to help us develop our aptitude for locating high quality resources in a rapidly changing digital environment that is becoming proficient at monopolizing our attention with useless or unreliable information. This book is about taking charge of the search process and not handing over the reins to search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo to dictate what information we consume. Each chapter focuses on a quest for different types of information while digging deeper into the complexities of finding credible places to look for information and ways to think about evaluating it. As the Internet evolves and becomes more sophisticated, our strategies for finding and evaluating information need to evolve as well. The stories in this book range from investigating challenging research questions to exploring health issues and everyday life questions like finding a reliable restaurant or product review. These chapters go beyond the simple and more mechanical checklist approach to evaluating information, though these factors are also discussed.