Finding Internet Truth

Recently, my tenth grade History class put our internet searching skills to the test, while also refining them by exchanging some “what-works” and “what-doesn’t-work” with our group mates.  

Our first challenge was a Google a Day. When my teacher first introduced it, I had no idea what she was talking about. Is she going to award use for googling daily? Has she been awarded the Google a Day prize herself? Turned out, a few minutes later, that Google a Day is a website, designed for students to test both their speed and accuracy in the realm of Google searching. The website looks more or less like the average Google homepage except that at the bottom is a question. Fittingly, my group’s first question was historical, something about an American freedom document being presented to an English King. Instead of typing in the whole question, we typed in the key words like “freedom document” and “English king” and the first result had the name of the document. Then, we got two more questions and repeated our process and my group finished second, earning us the delightful reward of candy.

The second challenge began innocently enough. We were asked to define Accuracy, Authenticity, and Reliability, three key things to look for when assessing the credibility of a website. I define accuracy as truthful information, and the ability for that information to agree with other sources on the same topic. Authenticity was defined by the whole class as having what something claims to be match its actual purpose, Mrs. Gallagher used the example of the unauthentic martinlutherking.org, which, the average person would expect to teach about the man and wish to spread his messages, but instead horrifically promotes everything Martin Luther King Jr. fought against. And the last word, Reliability, I see as not only the reliability of the information, like Accuracy covers, but also the trustworthiness of the author. Say, if the author of a website about math topics has a degree in math, I would assume that website is very reliable.  

Now that all the website credibility words have been defined, I am brought to the website where we put them to the test, www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus. Now, this website is full of information on this octopus, including links to videos of them hatching, photographs in color and black and white and anything else you might want except one little thing, the truth. How do I know that this website is spitting lies? Besides my previous knowledge of this website, I know this because of two of the three words above, accuracy and reliability. Testing the reliability and accuracy of the information, I found that the majority of websites on the internet, even the Wikipedia page, that use the phrase “Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus” include the word “hoax”. And that was the end of any suspicions I might have had.