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Some tips when searching for information online

By James Bradley


Is there too much information on the internet now? There is so much information you can find an answer to pretty much anything, but the problem is because of the amount out there then it can be hard to wade through and find what you need. Another huge problem is can you really trust that information? How do you know the person who wrote it actually has the right facts? If it is just a fact you want to know, or when a new TV series starts then it doesn't really matter, but if you are trying to find out something about your car or are planning a holiday based on the information you discover, then you need to be sure it correct.

Wikipedia is now a good source of information on most things, and that is certainly the place I turn to when I want information on anything from a country I want to visit to an animal I saw on the news, but it is lacking in some areas and you shouldn't blindly trust the information in there. Wikipedia is basically an online encyclopedia, but if you want to know how to do something, as opposed to finding information about something, then you will need to search elsewhere.

Getting written instructions on how to do something is ok and you can learn from that, but often it is so much easier to have a video of somebody actually doing it in front of you, which is why I tend to head to YouTube for things like that. We all have different ways of learning though, so if you actually prefer written instructions then there are plenty of sites out there which can help you out, like Wikihow.com.

While most of the information online is free then there is some information you are going to have to pay for like personal records which have had to be collated by private companies so they charge for access to recoup their costs and also turn a profit. For instance if you are researching your family tree and you find you need access to divorce records to see when a marriage ended etc, then the only way to get access to that information is to search for it yourself on government websites, or pay a site like Ancestry.com. You do have to pay a fee every month for access, and maybe even pay to get physical copies of records, but it is worth it.

One thing we haven't touched on yet is the powerful search engines which you can use to find what you are looking for like Google. I have noticed that some questions start to give you direct answers now, rather than giving you a list of websites to browse, like if you ask to convert a currency or unit of measurement. The vast majority of the time, say 9/10 or 90% of the time, then Google will give you the answer to any question you could have within the first page of 10 web results, but remember to find out if you can trust the website that is giving you the answer. The other 10% of the searches you do will need to be more specific if you want to find what you are looking for, trying adding on words to better describe it, or use the search function on large sites like Wikipedia instead.




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