The Free Web is made up of web pages you can find using Google and other free web search engines. Some assignments do not allow free web resources. Good material may be found here, but you might also find a lot of popular resources that are inappropriate for academic writing. Refer to our guide that explains the SIFT Method for evaluating information.
The Fee Web (also known as the Hidden, Invisible, or Deep Web) includes subscription databases. You can limit your results to full text and scholarly, peer-reviewed articles that are often required.
It's usually easy to know when you have a piece of scholarly information: it was written by experts on the subject, it underwent a peer review by other experts on the subject, it contains original research, it was published in a scholarly journal.
Similarly, you can usually identify a piece of popular information: it was written by a journalist (or it doesn't list an author at all), the writing is entertaining and informal, there are no references or citations.
However, not all information falls neatly into those two categories. There can be a range of source types between popular and scholarly.
For example, information from websites like The Pew Research Center are an excellent source for statistics and public opinion. Data scientists conduct original research on topics that shape society, analyze the data in an unbiased way, and present the final information in the form of a report.
Here are some examples of sources that do not fall under scholarly or popular but would still be good sources for your research.
When searching the free web, you'll typically encounter the same few website domains. Here's what they mean:
Google Searching
Try library resources first (like books and databases). If you search Google, try these search tips:
use "quotation marks" for phrase searching
-site:.com added to your search will eliminate ALL .com sites in search results
site:.edu (or site:.gov) should ONLY search within the designated domain
Use the SIFT Method to evaluate what you find