Are Your Everyday Websites Reliable?

After looking at John R. Henderson’s tutorial I began to surf through different websites that I use on a regular basis. My blog of choice is www.perezhilton.com , #1 website is www.wikipedia.org, and best search engine is www.google.com. Throughout the day I check in with all these sites because they are either informative, entertaining, or quick. However, Professor Henderson raises a good point in his lesson; are these websites reliable?

The first website I decided to focus on was Perez Hilton’s blog. This blog is merely entertaining. You won't find hard news, politics or international business on this site. However, you sure will find the latest scandals with celebrities, newest fashion trends, and overall, funny stories. Perez Hilton too, allows his readers to contribute to his blog through comments and even stories. Every so often he has a video or a letter from a fan posted for an entry. I personally find this blog to be set up rather well. He uses multiple forms of multimedia, for example: writing, graphics, video and sound. However, the question really is: Is it reliable?

I went through Professor Henderson's steps to answer this question. One of his concerns is "What is the purpose of the sight?" I definitely think it is supposed to be an entertaining site if anything. However, when I really look at it, there is A LOT of advertisements. At times, when I log in the whole background of the site is an advertisement. All along the sides are ads from t-shirt companies, TV shows, music producers, magazines and tons more. All in all, this site is definitely making money with all of the support from the advertisers. Another comment from Henderson was about the details of the website: Are the links working? Is the spelling and grammar correct? How are all the details? Overall, Perez Hilton is a very flashy site. However, all of his links work properly and amazingly, (even with his hourly updates) I've never seen any problems in the spelling or grammatical area.

The next site I took a closer look at was Wikipedia. This site to me is just your average website. It is a free encyclopedia on the web that allows people everywhere to add in / edit information. That right there to me is a complete red flag. ANYONE?? Yes, anyone can post onto this sight.

For myself, I take everything I read from Wikipedia with a grain of salt. You can't trust everything you read. Especially, when comparing it to Professor Henderson's standards, it's hard to trust everything that's on the site. One piece of advice Professor Henderson gave was "When in doubt, doubt". And that is exactly what I do when I get to Wikipedia. I realize that everything that is on this so-called "encyclopedia" cannot be fully accurate. With that, one should always verify the information that is given to them. Furthermore, "Consider the source" as Henderson says. In a lot of the articles and postings on Wiki, we don't even know where it is coming from. We don't know the writers credentials or how he/she even knows the information. Therefore, you can't always rely on this website for the best kind of information.

My last spot was Google. Whenever I have any kind of query or thought, my first instinct is to go to Google. It is really fast and seems to always help me out when searching for a particular topic. As a whole, it is pretty hard to say anything bad about Google because they seem to do everything right; they have mail, they are a search engine, you can personalize the site and on and on the list goes.

However, if you focus on it just being a search engine then we can run into some problems in regards to Professor Henderson. His first comment on his tutorial is "Make sure you are in the right place". This is an extremely good point because sometimes I just resort to Google because it is fast and easy. However, after spending some time with it, Google may not answer my question. Sometimes a library database is much better than Google because it can bring up your actual topics rather than something that just contains a word in you search. It's hard to say it but you can't depend on Google for everything.

All in all, this exercise really helped to reevaluate the websites I look at and depend on on a regular basis. They really aren't all that great and other websites or sources could be used more effectively.