The following criteria are appropriate for evaluating information of any kind. Evaluation is especially important when dealing with information found online. Review the following criteria and answer the questions based on the web page you are evaluating.
Note: Domains such as .ca (Canada) or .au (Australia) are country-specific domain names.
Domain searching allows you to pick what type of websites you want to see in your results. For academic and professional research, that usually means .edu, .org and .gov are good bets.
Commercial sites (.com) are seldom very useful and are hard to cite.
Just do a search for a topic using Google and on the results page, click Settings and then click Advanced Search.
For example, I have typed in edu.
A much quicker way to do this!
You can manually do a domain search right from the initial Google homepage. Just type in your topic and then add the word site, a colon, & then a domain to limit to. For example:
Cesar Chavez site:edu
That will only pull websites on Cesar Chavez that are sitting on a server at a real, accredited US college or university.