As a college student in the late 1990s I spent more time in the library than I did in bed, but as a college professor in the early 21st century I am finding most of my students have never been to the local library. Instead, the World Wide Web has brought libraries around the world to their desktop.

As of April 2005, Google, the world's most popular search engine, had indexed more than 8 billion web pages, enough for each of the world's six billion people to have one of their own. Such a wealth of information has simultaneously made research easier and more difficult. Finding information is easy; figuring out if it is worth anything is hard.

The following tips should make the process easier.

Check the Date

Back when encyclopedias were the first stop on a research journey, our teachers warned us to get the most recent year possible, especially with a topic related to technology. The same rules apply, but now that the Internet is the first stop the goal is not to get the most recent year but the most recent day or even hour.

Estimates vary, but experts generally agree that a new webpage is introduced every six seconds. Newspapers and magazines, a staple of information for college research papers, are constantly updating their sites as news breaks. So check the date. If the site is a few hours old it is probably fine. If it is a few years old, it would be a good idea to keep clicking.

Double and Triple Check

After finding a website that looks useful, do another search to see if other websites confirm it. Intellectual historians tell us that we have learned more in the past 50 years than we have in the past 5,000, so there is bound to be more than one source.

• If the information was found in a scholarly journal, check to see how often the article has been cited in other professional papers.
• If the information was found in the Washington Post, check the New York Times to see if it matches up.
• If the information is from someone's personal website, check to see if anyone else agrees.

It is also worth checking to see if the website has a brick and mortar equivalent. HTML is a fairly easy computer language, and a skilled programmer can create a website that looks a lot like USA Today.

However, if they are doing it out of their basement in their pajamas, they do not have the resources of the large newspaper. This does not necessarily make their information wrong, but it should subject it to greater scrutiny.