Put yourself in the place of a sophomore trying to search a contentious topic on the web. Assess the quality of your findings.Imagine that you're a typical UC Berkeley sophomore and have just been assigned a paper on some plausible topic over which there is some division of opinion-- whether the relation of Vitamin C to cancer, simplification of the tax code, electronic voting, heterosexual spread of AIDS, Ebonics/Black English. pick whatever you like, so long as it's the kind of topic where people recognize the relevance of "authoritative" opinion, even if they disagree as to what it is or who is entitled to hold it. (That is, don't pick the question of whether the intentional walk rule should be changed or whether hip-hop is a force for Good or Evil.)

Like most of your classmates, the first thing you do is go to Google and enter a search query or two. You come up with a bunch of pages of varying degree of authority or reliability. Then be prepared answer the following questions: What makes for the impression of authoritativeness in a document found on the Web? Give specific examples of institutional cues, domain names, graphical and typographic cues, linguistic cues (right down to punctuation), cues in html code, and anything else that seems relevant.

How can the impression of authority be undermined? That is, what kinds of (actually) authoritative pages are likely to appear non-authoritative and vice-versa?

Which queries work best for finding authoritative information? Are there any general principles here? Does it help to look at pages that come up later, or to include non-relevant terms like "paint" or "Cleveland" that will effectively reduce the set to a more random sample? What happens if you include words like "authoritative," "official," or "debunk"?

How could the results be improved using multiple search engines? (For these purposes, one other will suffice.) E.g., what can you do using the proximity feature of AltaVista or some other feature that Google doesn't have?