This chapter was primarily about how to search the web. I feel I'm pretty well versed in this, having done a large percentage of internet researching in high school. This chapter did introduce to me the idea of subject directories. I never really knew that such things existed in Google or other search engines. I can see how they would be incredibly useful in a search that resulted in a lot of spam websites at the first pass. I wonder how widely used this directory is. I've never even heard of it until reading this chapter. I'll have to give it a try on my next internet searching adventure.
This chapter also covers the differences between reliable and unreliable website sources. Generally I've tried to be very aware of this distinction. For example, through trial and error I've learned that Wikipedia is useful when you're trying to find out something general about a subject, just out of curiosity, but it is a very unreliable source when it comes to writing a research paper or a radio story. My old Broadcast Journalism teacher outlawed the citation of Wikipedia very early on in the course. Generally now days, I try to only take facts from websites that I've heard to be reliable, or ones associated with a organization or person I trust. For example, I might not believe something I found on Wikipedia until I saw the same factoid in an article on the CNN website. Through writing stories for radio I also had to become aware of a website's bias and learn to read between the lines. I also became an expert at finding sites with a counter-bias, so that between the two I could understand the real story.
I feel very confident about the topics discussed in this chapter, though it was interesting to learn about the search directories.
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I also thought it was interesting to learn about search directories. I had no idea that these existed, and I think they will be very useful for narrowing down broad topics.
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