Putting the Web to the Test
By Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 3/1/1997
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Admit it. There's a part in all of us that wants to see just what the Web (and its search engines) are made of.
I decided to show no mercy. I set out in search of good student-level web sites on one of my personal reference bugbears, the Great Wall of China. I've always been amazed at how difficult it is to come up with student-level information on the Great Wall once country reports wipe out the shelves.
If you're searching for a Great Wall of China site and you choose "great," "wall," and "China" as terms, you might think you were on the right track. You'll rethink that soon enough.
I began in Yahoo, typed in "great wall china," and got only two hits -- one for the Great Wall adoption agency, "for Americans who wish to adopt children from China," and the other a link to the "Beijing Page," an obviously commercial (but interesting) site promoting business and tourism in the Chinese capital.
I sighed and noticed that Yahoo had simultaneously searched AltaVista for "great wall china," so I clicked on that link. Several promising hits appeared, but most turned out to be people's travel photos. I did find some interesting NASA satellite photos of the Wall, but still no homework-oriented information. I tried HotBot with much the same result, but fewer dead links.
My web attack quickly taught me two things: there are many Chinese restaurants in America named "Great Wall," and there are hundreds of pictures of the Wall, with little or no useful information attached.
To summarize my travails, I had no luck with Yahooligans' subject tree or search engine. Searching Magellan got me 68,086 hits, including Golf America Online. Rogue page alert! After skipping past numerous tour group pages, I reached the 14th hit.
Bingo. Well, make that a qualified bingo. That 14th hit, named simply "China",offered an introduction to the Great Wall, four very nice photographs, and an academic connection: an affiliation with Brigham Young University's Hawaii campus. It's really too short for any in-depth assignment, but after two hours of searching, it was the best I could find.
After this article was published in the print SLJ, I received several "Great Wall" suggestions from readers. The one I liked best, although it's not specifically a page for young people, is The Great Wall. It's part of a story of a group of travelers from the University of Maine, but it does offersome report-worthy information on the Wall. I'm still looking for that "perfect" site, though.
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