Directed Searching

from Poynteronline

[note cool Change article Text size: try clicking on each of these…]

“While information can be found quickly and easily using tools such as Google, the problem is often not a lack of content, but rather the volumes of stale and questionable content. Determining the accuracy and sourcing of search results is a challenge for any journalist, oftentimes negating the time saved by using the Internet.”

Class excercise

Day in the life of a spammer:

• start at cyberjournalist.net
  browse in J-Blogroll to find:
  • A Day in the Life of a Spammer
    What does the author of this blog compare spamming to?

(note how the address of the link appears in the bottom of the browser when you hover over the link - do I want to click on this link??)

• Article in Ecommerce with the same title
  How much can a spammer expect to earn for a big email ‘campaign’ (240 million emails)?

• Now use google to find the same search term
  How many articles on the first page are links to the Ecommerce article?
  [Note: print this article is a good way of reading it sans adverts]
  Take a look at how ‘facts’ can get distorted - how much does the poster to Broadbandreports.com news (and who is he/she??) claim that spammers make per 240 millions emails? Compare this with what the original article was saying.

How many articles (and what were they) on the first two google pages were:

• blog entries talking about the article?
• discussion forums with comments?
• lengthy commentary or summary of the orginal article
• other

Create a table like this :

Category	number pages
blog entries
discussion forums
commentary on web site
other reference

Where in the google listing was the article itself?

Which other page did you find the most useful?

Posted by markp at September 10, 2004 04:22 PM | TrackBack