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.

Connect the Dots

All websites have a domain name extension, and the most typical is .com, which stands for "company." Anyone with Internet access and the resources to pay a nominal fee can create a .com website, so the extension does not immediately grant credibility.

As the number of domain names has proliferated, administrators have added .net, which functions as an overflow for .com, and .org, which is primarily used by nonprofits and advocacy groups. The same scrutiny should apply.

Websites that end in .edu have more intellectual currency because they are typically connected to educational institutions. As colleges and universities become more generous with their knowledge supply this is becoming a gold mine of research potential. Some professors have been known to post their entire course material online.

The .gov domain is reserved for government entities like the Department of Justice, an excellent source for crime statistics, and the Food and Drug Administration, a wealth of information on new pharmaceuticals. Government information is typically reliable, but one word of caution: while the law requires government agencies to be transparent, it does not require them to be user-friendly.

Other domain names apply to a specific country, and network administrators are working on introducing specific new names, but those are the most common.

Check for an author

The Internet is a good place for anonymity, but those looking for credible information should be wary of someone unwilling to put their name on the line.

Concerns about privacy are overblown. Anyone who wants their opinion or wisdom to be public knowledge should be more than willing to put their name to it.

If the posting is anonymous, there is probably a reason, and it may be best to keep clicking.

Sharpen Occam's Razor

Occam's Razor is a philosophical idea that essentially says the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

If a piece of expository information makes the head spin or invites the reader to a game of six degrees of separation, it probably has more than a few factual or interpretive flaws.

In geometry, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The same principle applies to knowledge.

Can you spell taht?

At about the second week of the semester, I tell my students that as smart as they may think they are, I am going to judge them stupid until proven otherwise if I see foolish misspellings on a paper.

It has the desired effect, but the admonition provides more than just shock value. If a website is full of spelling and grammar errors, a researcher should wonder how careful the webmaster has been with their facts.

Misspelled words mean carelessness, and careless authors are not valuable sources.