Answer:
Any information that you use to support ideas and arguments in a research paper should be given some scrutiny. Printed materials that are collected in a library go through an evaluative process as librarians select them to include in their collections. There is also an evaluation of Web sites that are included in search directories, such as Yahoo!, at least to the extent of classifying and placing sites into a categorization scheme. However, sites harvested by "spiders" or "robots" for search engines don't go through any evaluative process.
There are no real restrictions or editorial processes for publishing information on the Web, beyond some basic knowledge of Web page creation and access to a hosting computer. Anyone can publish opinion, satire, a hoax, or plainly false information. To insure that the Web sites you use as information sources are acceptable for research purposes, you should ask questions about those sites. The following are some elements you should look at before deciding to use a Web site as a research resource:
Domain suffix
The term "dot.com" has become a ubiquitous phrase in the English language. The "dot.com" really refers to the domain of a Web site. Sites on the Web are grouped by their URLs according to the type of organization providing the information on the site. For example, any commercial enterprise or corporation that has a Web site will have a domain suffix of .com, which means it is a commercial entity.
