The way to establish whether an "online fact" is credible is to cross-check it against several pages, and see if the fact is sourced anywhere. Any given page could be wrong, and that goes for even apparently credible pages like the mayo clinic health site or wikipedia, or whatever. One other thing that a kid can be on the lookout for is that very similar language in an explanation indicates that you're dealing with the same source, so the pages ought not count as confirming each other.

I don't know that there are explicit rules. I think it's just gaining experience determining credibility. Have her pick some and show them to you from time to time; she'll sort out what the rules are once you give her enough examples.

Maybe start with a specific search--like, oh, prehistoric fish or something? Something where you're obviously going to look at "branded" sites a lot--museum sites, National Geographic, whatever. That provides, I think, a basis for evaluating the hobbyist sites that you might look at later. It would seem like doing some specific searches together might build the know-how without having to articulate too much meta/no-flash/earth-tones stuff.

You can say, "Whether or not the site is dying to catch your attention."

If I were talking to a kid, I'd say it like this: There are two types of sites - sites that are passive and sites that are aggressive. Passive sites are just hanging out and presenting information, and you have to do the work to find it. Aggressive sites really want your attention, so they don't care so much about accuracy. If the site feels like it's being grabby, it's probably being aggressive.

very similar language in an explanation indicates that you're dealing with the same source

This is nice -- I do that, but hadn't thought about it explicitly.

Her second grade teacher is encouraging them to rely on Wikipedia uncritically. On the one hand, it's good that they should know that there are answers out there, but not having a sense of how unreliable it is worries me. Come to think of it, maybe I'll find a topic I know enough about to make some edits to, and have her do the edits, just so she really gets that anyone can mess with Wikipedia.

I am hyper-vigilant about googling, so my first suggestion is always to only rely on primary sources - if you are researching a museum, the only trustworthy source is the museum website. If you're interested in dinosaurs, only trust a site created by an actual dinosaur.

I'm psyched to see other people's answers to this, because it's something that I've had a lot of trouble articulating effectively to Freshman Comp students. I'll be happy to steal all of your ideas.

"a topic I know enough about to make some edits"
I think it's a better demonstration if you show her that you can edit something about which you have no clue.

Mind you, my hypervigilance did not prevent me from falsely diagnosing my son with autism after googling a very credible-seeming study on the subject.

It is not run by people apparently named "Ogged" or "Fontana Labs" or "Lizardbreath."

Does the hover text mention cocks?

The rules for evaluating internet authority are the same for evaluating any authority.

1. Good sources explain who their sources are, either by telling you where they read it, or by explaining what their first hand experience is.

2. Good sources make claims that are specific and verifiable. They don't try to hide their ignorance with vagueness.

3. Good sources don't talk down to you. (This is another version of Heebie's 4, which I think is really well put.")

4. Good sources have corroboration (as outlined by ogged's 1).

5. Really good sources have something to loose if they are misleading you. This is why testimony under oath is more reliable than someone shooting their mouth off in a bar. On the internet, you have something to loose if you have established a reputation for reliability.

8: That's exactly what I was thinking. Although that may be a bit of a cynical lesson for a 7 yr old?

Probably not. As someone said, "No matter how cynical you get these days, you just can't keep up."

12.5- Also beware of sites with grammatical and spelling errors.

"No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up." - Lily Tomlin

Or so says Google.

Actually, that little search revealed another technique: do you get instant corroboration even on the first 10 hits? Lily Tomlin gets referenced 4 times on the first page, so I feel pretty comfortable that she either originated it or is generally credited with it (which is close enough for a blog comment).

14 should have been offered by w-lfs-n.

I might add that, while a good heuristic, it may not be so valuable to a 7 yr old. Although if a second grader spots the errors, she should sure as hell stay away....

Be sure to distinguish between actual authority and appeals to authority.

Oh and two more:

6. Evaluate the nature of the claim. Is the claim very unlikely given other things we know? Always apply Hume's argument on miracles.

7. Evaluate the source's agenda. Are they up front about it? Are they trying to argue against someone else? Are they fair to them?

I personally think that spelling and grammatical errors are perfectly compatible with reliability. But I only think this because my site has so many.

Everybody's suggestions are great. I would add to Rob's list:

Good sources don't try to hide who they are. A .gov or .us site is generally more trustworthy than a .com/pandora/box/lots_of_menus/Dept_Transportation, especially if the fake DOT site is claiming that 7-year-olds will soon be able to get their own driver's licenses.

Also, teach her how to look things up on Snopes.

17 is a good one. I would describe it as distinguishing primary and secondary sources, though, since a well cited appeal to authority is credible.

our university says that the most credible sites are .edu followed by .gov and .org.

Adding "edu" to a search usually helps.

If you're looking for something academically legit you might just use Google Scholar.

scholar.google.com

Preference should always be given to sites that ask you to register for a membership, since these sites keep tighter controls on their information.

There are a lot of personal pages hosted on .edu sites.

Rob's list is very good. I'd avoid a heuristic based on the tone of a website, because that's something that can only really be reliable based on long experience and furthermore the precise details of the heuristic change with innovations in web technology and changes in the popularity of web tools.

The counter-rule to that is that you can always ignore anything written in several different colours with lots of exclamation marks.

Can't you just teach her how to email her questions to "Ask the Mineshaft"? The hive mind never fails.

I tend to trust the sites that confirm my prejudices.

Isn't Wikipedia totally foolprrof?

It's good that you're teaching her search engine skills. I'll never forget my brother's first run in with Google: he wanted to find pages for other people who like the St. Louis Cardinals. His line of thinking went "people who like the Cardinals" -> "Cardinals lovers" -> "lovers", which is what he googled. His results were...not what he'd expected.

It's amazing how many undergrads completely lacked this skill when I was teaching a few years ago.

I could only think that having them read actual books and do research in the library would help them figure out how to make good judgments about source credibility. I see now that this is hopelessly old-fashioned to a utopian degree.

Don't teach a little kid to register for a membership; on the contrary.

Rob and Rhiannon and Witt have good rules. Also teach her that good sites don't just make affirmations without themselves saying where the information came from--look for footnotes and bibliographies (and then click through and check to make sure the cited sources are legitimate). Look for acknowledgements of what *isn't* known yet and the limitations of the information presented.

And just because you *can* use the internet doesn't mean you shouldn't also use the library.

I saw my usually reasonable neighbor reprimanding his kids the other day for using google. I couldn't figure out a way to ask him the theory behind this without seeming like I was attacking his parenting methods.

28 - The problem with technologically savvy youth. My daughter wanted to google some song lyrics over the weekend and I happily sent her off to the computer. When she hollered to me in the other room, "Mom, something *weird* came up..." I imagined the worst. Luckily, just a printer error. But a good reminder that mayber we're not ready for unsupervised googling just yet...

30(a) -- the recommendation was made tongue in cheek.

31 seems fairly reasonable, no? Maybe he's trying to teach his kids to get their butts to the library and use established sources rather than being lazy.

I'm guessing the theory is "OMG, they might find teh pron!" Which I worry about some too -- the rule is "anything that's scary or confusing, come ask me about."

"Safe search." But yeah, teh pron. Sigh.

Many libraries offer the services of their reference staff online for free. My library, for instance. It might be a useful exercise to compare their results with the results of a Google search.

A neighbor came to me to ask how to search her computer to see if her sons had been viewing pron. I showed her caches and so on—we didn't find any. I was rather pleased that she thought I'd know, not merely on the basis of computer skills.

37 -- nice link, thanks -- I see it's not just your library's ref desk but a national network of reference librarians.

If you use the Safari browser, your kids can turn on Private Browsing and their adventures in Porntopia will leave nary a trace. Progress!

You can also pick up the phone and call the reference desk. Not that I do that, b/c I hate using the phone, but still.

Huh, I sort of thought that this is something that all children these days would just instinctively know how to do, kind of like how my generation can program VCR's and set digital clocks that baffle my parents.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with teaching your kid to look for decent graphic design. It IS a reasonably way of sorting out a lot of chaff on your first pass, and as a side benefit, if we teach the children that ugly sites = ignore them, then maybe in twenty years there won't be so many ugly sites.

UPitt used to have a Fact Line that promised to answer any question - usually immediately, but they'd get back to you if necessary.

Ah, I just checked if they're still there, and they are. 412-624-FACT. More useful, I would imagine, 10-15 years ago than now, but still pretty good.

if we teach the children that ugly sites = ignore them, then maybe in twenty years there won't be so many ugly sites.

This is about as realistic as "All you need is love."

Sweet and hopeful, but also delusional.

promised to answer any question

Was it used primarily by drunken philosophy students for prank purposes?

45: I just remembered that a friend used it once to settle a debate about Chuck Barris' alive-ness. They called his agent in Hollywood to get the answer. Google won't do that for you.

I just asked my kids this. The 9 (last week) year old said she just clicks on hits in order and shrugged when I asked her how she decided if a site looked interesting or useful when she got to it. The 10 year old said she usually clicks on the first hit, and then will read the snippets on the others to decide what to look at. She also told me sternly that not all webpages that flash are crap. I'm not sure either of them are very discerning, though the 10 year old has written essays from internet research and none of her references have looked ludicrous yet. I think if you're looking up something that there's lots about, like "lions", which mostly kids are, the first several pages of hits will be pretty much ok.

something that there's lots about, like "lions", which mostly kids are, the first several pages of hits

This goes for "cougars", too.

But god help them if they are researching cougars.

Would Bitch's site be on the first page of hits?

Damn that was fast.

I had to go through several pages of beaver links before I came across the first (somewhat oblique) reference. Same with cooter.

I recently had a conversation like that with my 18-year-old (!) sister. She was doing a research project on Wicca or something. And if the internet is good for anything besides porn, it's good for quasi-religious groups, pro- or con-, having very official looking webpages. I'm sure the Discovery Institute looks like a really smart site on evolution.

So we had a chat on how to find information ("because if you pull that shit in a college paper you're going to get someone like me who gives you a C- on principle"). I think it's not bad to start with the idea to learn from reputable authorities. Universities, online encyclopedias, that sort of thing. Once she gets a feel for what real research looks like, she'll be better able to judge the rest of the effluvia.

Ha, I used 4-FACT in the past year (the question was "Where do otters live?" The answer was "You know, like, rivers and shit." Then I specified it to "What part of North America?"). Nowadays it's basically a way that someone who is temporarily without access to the Internet can call up someone who has access to the Internet.

When my daughter first discovered Google Images she typed in all kinds of searches looking for fun pictures. I was in the kitchen so I only heard what happened when she searched for "girls": "Those aren't girls, they're ladies!" Followed immediately afterwards by "Yuck!" I raced over, but she'd already browsed away from the offending image.

On the other hand she knew exactly what she was doing when she searched for "bums".

It sets a bad precedent to just say "Good design --> Reliable". You have to make sure to always ask yourself whether the entity conveying information to you is profiting from the dissemination of the information. If so, it's likely to be bullshit, in the Princeton University Press-approved sense of the term, meaning that the person telling it to you doesn't care whether it's lies or the truth.

As mentioned earlier, corporations and wealthy "think tanks" and religious-funded lobbying groups can pay for unbelievably professional-looking context in which to house things like the Discovery Institute, the Alliance Of Concerned Citizens Who Love Fossil Fuels, the Coalition of Nonexistent Taxpayers For A Flat Tax And Abolition Of The Corporate Income Tax, and the American Enterprise Institute.

On the other hand, Rootsweb, for example, is the authoritative page for lots of obscure historical figures, and it looks like total crap with every page laid out in a different stream-of-consciousness way.

Any simple indicator is certain to be widely faked: for example, spammers now pay students to set up .edu pages or them.

Regarding authority: I think the question is: would the writer be credible if conveying the same information in another context - would you believe a book they wrote, or a lecture they gave?

Regarding primary sources: on my own site I do not cite primary sources for facts that are generally accepted in the field. Opinions do not need sources either, but should be presented as such.

Also look at where is site is linked to from (a link: search on Google, or just search for the url). If it is recommended by people who know the subject, it is a strong positive indicator. Yes, the Google algorithm does do this, but manual checking is better.

As for design, a lot of nutcase sites do seem to have weird designs. It can be a useful warning.

I'd say critical thinking is the best aproach to solve the problem. Any time you have the slightest doubt or something in the text you are reading looks fishy I suggest you chek it out through other sources.