Libraries are a better source of information compared to the net. According to the research done at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel, the source material found in three major libraries; The United States Library of Congress, The New York Public Library and the British Library shows that there is a decrease in quality, quantity and general representation of information in the results of the Internet search. The users did not receive balanced information if they based their research on the net.
The lead researcher Dr. Schwartz notes in the Journal of Internet research that the information found on the Internet are generally biased with a tendency towards science subjects and popular information alone.
The popular belief among many students and users that the Internet is the home of everything is deceiving. The Internet has a vast source of information contained in over 4 billion different publicly accessible websites. However it is surprising to find that only 6% of this content contains educational material. Considering the average life span of a web page to be almost three months, most of the material found in these sites are not indexed by the search engines and remain invisible to the normal user. Google for instance has indexed less than 20 % of all the available pages.
The fact that anyone can publish a web page is alarming because no one can authenticate and validate the information in the Internet. There are a lot of unpleasant content on the web and although it makes up less than 1% it is easily available to the average user. This kind of distraction does not make the Internet a good place to conduct research. Wikipedia for instance is the most frequently visited website. The site has an ever-changing pool of information which only relies on the accuracy of the contributors. Most of the information is not cited and there is no way to clearly determine its source. It is thus very clear that while sites such as Wikipedia keep up to date information, it is making researchers increasingly lazy, unconvincing and keep on supplying inaccurate information.
References
Nicholas C. (2008) Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains, available http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ [March 22, 2013]
Polson, P. G., & Lewis, C. (1990) Theory-based design for easily learned interfaces. Human–Computer Interaction, 5, 191–220.
Stallings, W. (2009) Business Data Communications, 6th edition, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall (ISBN: 9780136067412) [online] available, www.computing.net › Forums › Networking [March 22 2013]
