The Moss-Free Stone

Organizing Information

Certainly a part of organizing information is learning to evaluate the authenticity and reliability of information. Alan is sharing information on using ezWhois.net to learn about the creators of a website. This is a valuable tool for evaluating the authenticity/reliability of websites–knowing who built a website is akin to learning about the author of a book. Another is to use the search command link:. This, of course, reveals all sites that are linked to a particular url (backlinks). Add <space>host:edu (or other domain), and you can narrow your results. Seeing who is linked to a site opens the door to additional resources and reveals a great deal, at times, about the content of the site. Additionally, adding <space>host:edu link: (url) to the search gives the “intersection of information”–sites with links to two sites.

How about finding information from only a specific country? Use this format when searching: (search term) host:uk. Imagine looking for British sites on the American Revolution? More specifically, a child could look for schools in England discussing the American Revolution–”American Revolution” host:ac.uk . This will return only results relating to the American Revolution posted by British schools.
The Wayback Machine is an online tool that allows users to view archived versions of websites, even sites no longer in existence (be careful what you blog!).

Alan is also explaining how Google rankings occur. They are based upon, in order, domain name, site description, contents, meta tags, and links. He is fired up about an article suggesting that Google bombs (massive linking to a site) alone can bump up its ranking.

Answer.com is a good information resource, claiming to be the “web’s greatest encyclodictionalmanacapedia. A search reveals many, many types of information from a variety of sources. Also inclues a good citation tool, similar to Citationmachine. Looks to be a very useful resource!

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