Conducting Research
BEWARE
The websites that you may want to use are not necessarily reliable
Google (including Google images) is a search engine. Search Engines find information from elsewhere on the internet. You can use Google, but must follow the links to the original source.
Wikipedia is a fairly reliable source for basic information (in what year did George Washington die?). But be warned, anyone can modify Wikipedia. The school is banned from editing Wikipedia because of past abuses. Try not to use Wikipedia.
Castles are Da Bomb!
Stay away from Urban Dictionary. This website was created as a fake dictionary.
Like Google, Yahoo is a search engine. Treat Google and Yahoo the same - follow the links to the source.
When conducting research, you must always keep in mind who is publishing items on the internet. What is their agenda? What are they trying to accomplish? Ask.com is similar to Google in that it is a search engine that looks for websites that answer your question. Again, follow the links.
A word about website suffixes:
Anyone can purchase a website with numerous suffixes. Mr. Heffron has owned websites ending in ".com", ".org", ".info", ".net"
Reliable websites that can almost always be trusted are:
.gov Only government agencies are allowed to contain this suffix
.edu Only schools are allowed to contain this suffix
Preferred Websites
The national archives contain a plethora of primary sources. Operated by the Federal Government, it is the clearing house for all information that is government related. Most of it is available without bias so can be trusted.
History.com is the website of the History Channel. Although it has an entertainment function, I find most information to be fairly free of bias that is delivered in an interesting and educational way.
Bio.com is the website owned by A&E (Disney and the Hearst Corp). It has a wonderful collection of biographies that you may find useful. As with History.com, these are created primarily for entertainment purposes, but can be quite useful in your research.
