These days, in our networked world, why not just use the Web for obtaining materials for class assignments? The Web is easy and fast, and you can usually find something. Why not just use it?
The answer to this question is that the Web can indeed be very useful in research, but that it is necessary to understand how to use it; it's also necessary to understand what is on the Web and -- more importantly -- what isn't on the Web. In order to do this, we need to understand a few basic things about the Web.
The "Internet Fallacy"
The "Internet Fallacy" is essentially the false belief that "everything's on the Web". The reality is much different:
- FACT: Everything is not on the Web.
- FACT: Information not available for free on the Web includes virtually all copyright-protected documents (e.g., journal articles, conference literature, most books).
- FACT: Information not on the Web includes the majority of everything ever published. One significant reason for this state-of-affairs is simply the fact that large-scale print-to-electronic conversion is labor-intensive and expensive.
- FACT: In research conducted with business executives in 2003, it was estimated that the loss of productive time using search engines to conduct online research for information that is actually not available online cost businesses $31 billion.
Things To Be Aware Of When Using The Web For Research
Copyright Law
- Copyright law protects the intellectual property and products of information producers, such as book publishers, magazine and journal publishers, and others. It is hardly in the interest of information producers to give this information away for free on the Web when they are in the business to make a profit from it. Generally speaking, then, they don't give it away. On the Web, you occasionally find protected material, but in reality, most protected material is not on the Web. Moreover, spurred by fears of how easy it is to disseminate materials over the Web, many publishers have successfully pushed for more strict amendments to the copyright law.
- To realize the importance of copyright law with respect to the availability of copyright-protected material on the Web, it might be useful to think about what happens when you download music or movies. If you're doing this from a legal downloading site, you have to pay money. If you do it from an illegal site, you might not have to pay money, but you could be liable for copyright infringement.
Web Noise
- There is no doubt that the Web contains a tremendous amount of information. Lower bound estimates suggest the Web features billions of indexable pages (and this does not include non-indexable sites, or the "Deep Web").
- Some of these sites are very good and very useful. There are many sites which feature scholarly documents, research results, government publications, etc.
- Many academics -- in the interest of scholarly communication and cooperation -- often publish documents on the Web (assuming that they own the copyright for those documents).
- Libraries increasingly are working with search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, to make better research material available. (e.g. Google Scholar)
- A lot of sites on the Web, however, are devoted to advertising and personal interests. One researcher, for example, examined 1,160 different cited Web pages which were retrieved in answer to 60 questions. Of these pages, 33% were either dead links or duplicate pages; only 14% provided complete and correct answers; 10% provided correct -- but incomplete -- answers; 8% gave incorrect information; and an astonishing 56% provided no information to answer the question at all (James H. Sweetland, Spring 2000, "Reviewing the World Wide Web -- Theory Versus Reality" Library Trends Vol. 48(4), pp. 748-768).
Inadequate Web Information Retrieval on the Web
- No single Web search engine covers all of the Web. Better search results on the Web can usually be obtained using multiple search engines, or multi-search engine sites.
- Search engines do not index much content on the Web.
- Efforts are being made to improve search engine technology. These efforts are likely to result in searching costs for users, in some cases.
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