Seek and ye shall find

How often do you search from the web? How do you look up information from the web? Below is the evaluation of an expert in this area Reid Goldsborough, he published an article recently in the Teacher Librarian October, 2007. I would like to share his views with you, hopefully you could get some insight from his views.

He evaluated several on-line databases for the readers.

Wikipedia - The overall quality of Wikipedia's content is good. It contains nearly 2 million articles in English. The downside is: they might have mistakes though they can quickly be corrected. Another downside is that technical articles are often written for technical people without including basic material first. But after all, it's free.

Encylopaedia Britannica - It's cost subscription fee. It has fewer than 10% of the number of articles of Wikipedia. However, the articles tend to be more in-depth than Wikipedia's.

Answers.com (www.answers.com) is a free, advertising-supported service that combines the articles of Wikipedia with content from more than 120 titles from others publishers and its own original content.

HighBeam (www.highbeam.com) provide access to the information in more than 35 million documents from over 3.000 sources, including newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, transcripts, white papers, books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses, and almanacs. It is not free.

Dialog (www.dialogweb.com) and LexisNexis (www.nexis.com) are professional databases which aggregate information from hundreds of third-party databases and let you quickly search through any or all of them using the same search procedures. They are widely used by professional librarians and researchers but expensive.

AsMeNow (www.askmenow.com) allow your cell phone or wireless handheld computer to text a question and if your questions are handled, you will be charged.

Jatalla (www.jatalla.com) and ChaCha (www.chacha.com) 's results are ordered by human intelligence. You can even chat with a guide online. These 2 are still being tested.

After all, it seems that quality is still linked to price.


The above content is originally from
GOLDSBOROUGH, Reid (2007) New developments in web seraching, Teacher Librarian, October 2007