SOS 110Written Assignment 2
The internet offers data and information from around the world. It is use in so many different ways from entertainment, shopping, school to work researches. In using the internet, one normally starts by performing a search using their favorite search engine like Bing, Google or Yahoo. The results of these site engines can be great or not so great, depending what the person is looking for. And then there are databases which not a lot of people use or aware of. A database is an organized list of facts and information also available through the internet. Both search engines and databases are accessed through the internet but produce different types of result for the same topic.
I started by my search by using Bing as my preferred search engine and EBSCO provided by the school as my database. I used the topic “articles on privacy and security on the internet” for my internet search. I used “Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply and Questions to Ask” from Berkley for an evaluation guide. The number one result for Bing was www.ftc.gov; I think the results are based on popularity and the number of “hits” the website generate. Underneath the link you can find an unfinished description of what the site is all about. Using the evaluation guide, this site did not do well. Upon clicking on the link, it brought me to a page that has a microsite containing three different links. When I clicked on the first link, there were no article to be found, the second link had an article and an author but talked about kids, school and devices not related to my search and third link had an article on malware/spyware but no author and citation of any sources. The only good thing going for this site is that it is a .gov site which means that the site is safe and can be trusted because it’s a government site.
The first thing I notice when I logged in the EBSCO database is that there is no advertisement and commercials. The website is straight forward with several options to fine tune your database search. For this search, the top result from the database is “Hardening the browser”. This data rated well on the evaluation guide because it met most of the evaluation guide’s criteria. It has an author with and .edu email address. The article was made to inform, provide facts and backed with credible sources. The article has documented citations and references. More importantly, the authors of this article are credible, qualified and seem to be experts on the