Searching the internet for reliable sources is becoming increasingly difficult. I remember when I first started doing research online for school projects about seven or eight years ago, there wasn’t nearly as much clutter on it as there is now. Mostly, I believe it is because of advertising, but I also believe it is that anyone can publish information on the web, and more and more people are doing so. Over the years this has accumulated in mass amounts. There is something that can help us through the clutter, and this is something I am just starting to get a better grasp on, especially after reading chapter 5 in Bonnie L. Tensen’s book, research strategies for a digital age.
I am doing a project for my com 430z class on Web 2.0 technologies. We had to choose one of these technologies and report on it. YouTube was the one that caught my interest the most. This is the part of the project where I have to find credible and reliable sources dealing with this topic, and then evaluate those sources, and explain how I came across them.
The first method I used to look up YouTube was through the search engine Google. I chose this because this is how I previously searched the internet no matter what I was looking for. This is of course before reading Tensen. I really wanted to get a firsthand look at the difference that knowledge about how search engines work can make on the efficiency and accuracy of researching. It turned out to be extremely significant. First I just used the key word “YouTube” and searched it on the main Google page. This, as I figured, brought me to a bunch of links that I didn’t need. These links were basically all either involved in viewing YouTube Videos or Creating YouTube Videos.
The nest step I decided to take was to use a tip from Tensen, which involved using Google’s built-in search categories. Since I am looking for reliable and easily sited information, I chose to use Google’s scholar search. This made a huge difference, it brought me to links to pages that had full texts and accredited sources, like these ones; “Youtube traffic characterization: a view from the edge”, “I Tube, You Tube, Everybody Tubes: Analyzing the World’s Largest User Generated Content Video System”, “Understanding the Characteristics of Internet Short Video Sharing: YouTube as a Case Study”,and Dot-Com Boom Echoed in Deal to Buy YouTube. All of which I found to be exactly the backed up information I needed.
My next step was to get more specific with my key terms. YouTube has a substantial amount of information about it on the web, and I needed to limit it down to a narrower topic, which I decided to be the history of YouTube. So, that’s what I chose for key terms “History of YouTube”. Surprisingly, at least to me, this really did give me what I was looking for. Many of the same kind of sites popped up. I also noticed that the second hit to pop up was one that didn’t really look all that scholarly. It was titled YouTube Nation, which I thought was going to be good, but after looking at it, it looked very much like a high school essay, or something of that nature. Even though the author cited all of the sources he/she used, there were a couple things that turned me away from this source. These are things that Tensen explains to look for. Number one was, like I said before, the way it appeared and its format. The second was that when I looked up the authors name I could not find anything out about him/her. And the third was that the page was only cited in one other place. Many of the other links were cited many more times than this. I am not going to completely rule this source out, but I think my best bet would be to get a second opinion.The next step I chose to take was to use some search engines and resources I have never heard of. These are the ones I took right out of Tensen’s book. I would like to note beforehand that I used all of the same key terms for all of the search engines. These terms consisted of “YouTube”, History of YouTube”, and “How YouTube began”. The first engine I used was called Suite101. This seems like a very good place to find credible information, but the closest thing I could find to my topic was an article called YouTube: Why Is it So Popular?. I like this search engine because even know many of the articles are written by freelance writers, I believe it requires its authors to provide background information and their credits. This site also provides links to the author’s previous work and other helpful information. The only thing I can think of being a flaw with this engine is that it doesn’t contain a very large amount of sources. Therefore its range may be limited which I found to be true with my topic. Next I used AltaVista. This search engine was fairly useful to me and I found a couple good sources here. The first was called YouTube - Successful Entrepreneurs, and this was the one I think was the most relevant to what I wanted. While searching the rest of the search engines I just recently discovered like; Academic Info, BUBL Link, The internet Public Library, and a couple others, I noticed that many of them did not have the kind of information that I was looking for. This is unfortunate because all of these sites contained well back information that was easy to evaluate. The only reason I can think of for them not having what I wanted is because it is a fairly new topic and maybe in time they will have more information on it. I do want to say that in the future I will use these tools to do research, because I know if I do find what I am looking for it will be reliable. They are set up much like the Suite101 site that I described earlier
The last thing on my agenda was to find at least two sources in the library in my school. I came up with these two; The Web 2.0 Visual Glossary and YouTube, which I found on Ebsco. These seemed to be very dependable sources. Like most things published in print they had everything I needed to use to do my homework on the information. I believe just by looking at how much time and effort was put into these sources that the authors really cared about what they were doing, and this usually proves to pay off in the sense that they did their homework.
Overall, I think this part of the project really helped me. I have a much better sense of direction now, plus I have completed much of my research. I also think that Tensen’s book really helped. And just because I couldn’t use many of the search engines she recommended, she still helped give me good criteria for evaluating the sources that I did find. I also know that I will be able to use the search engines later on in life.
Wasserman, Todd (2006). YOUTUBE. Brandweek. 47( 37) pM14-M17. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=22894085&site=ehost-live
Skiba, Diane J. 2007 Nursing Education Perspectives. Nursing Education 2.0: You Tube. 28 (2). p100-102. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=24776212&site=ehost-live
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