Dr. Mimi Recker, Victoria University's senior lecturer in educational technology, says that while it is easy to search the World Wide Web using search programs like AltaVista, it is almost impossible to know if information is accurate or reliable. This may be good for some very limited information, but otherwise impractical. By the time some of the information has been reviewed, it may be antiquated or irrelevant.
Search results reflect the search structure and the search engine used.
Ms Recker is involved with a research project called AsiaWeb, in which a group of people interested in Asia-Pacific law and business matters can submit reviews of relevant Web sites to a database. This small set lends itself to review. You can't have a card catalogue of the Web but you can make available other people's views on what to look. Typically it is a particular class of people who do book reviews, but on the Web anyone can do these sorts of information reviews. She says that social information filtering could be adopted by Web search engines so that information they find could be classified according to what other Web users interested in the topic think of it, as a way of filtering search results.