The Common Characteristics of Valuable Wepages: Assignment#2 The reason I chose the first valuable site at www.nt.com/entrops/magellan/ferdinand/MagellanBio.html was because this site gave a full biography of Ferdinand Magellan. It included his early life, his plans, his voyage, when he entered the Pacific and his death. It also displayed a map showing his exploration route. The second good site was at www.magellan.net/magellan/our_company/history.html. This site also had an informative biography of Magellan. The authors of this webpage gave their views on the type of person that Magellan was. They described him to be adventurous and possibly one of the most courageous men in American history. This site also had a very realistic image of Magellan. The third site that I liked was at www.adventure.com/encyclopedia/general/rfimagel.htm. They referred to this site as The First World Tour. This site had lots of information about Magellan and his voyage around the world. This site also included an image of the route that Magellan followed. I also really enjoyed the site at http://westy.jtwn.k12.pa.us/~mcy/us1ch2magellan.html. This site offered two links about Ferdinand Magellan. One link led you to why Magellan even tried to go around the world. The second link brought you to a picture of Magellan and a biography. This site would be very useful to incorporate into a lesson about this famous explorer. Another helpful site was at www.mtco.com/~mschertz/magellan.htm. This site also offered a biography about Magellan. What I liked about this site is that it offered you the information in an almost poetic format. This would even be a good site to print out and distribute to my students for them to gain more insight to the kind of person that Ferdinand Magellan was. My final and favorite site was at www.skittler.demon.co.uk/magellan.htm. This was a fascinating page! First of all it was written by a 10-year-old boy(9years and 6months to be exact). This site gave every bit of information you could possibly need about Magellan. This site displayed maps and many pictures including pictures drawn by the author of the page. It described Magellan’s early life and his life at sea. This webpage even included the log of the ship’s journal entries during the voyage around the world. I also loved this site because I teach 5th grade and my students are the same age as the boy who wrote this page. I think it would be wonderful for the children to see what a child their age is capable of doing over the internet. Even though I did come across many terrific sites, I did discover sites that would not be useful at all. The first irrelevant site that I wrote about was at www.tmgusa.com. This site was an advertisement page for the Magellan Group’s Tools for Living From Around the World. This site displayed things for sale such as an ultrasound toothbrush and indoor/outdoor grills. This site would not be helpful in a classroom setting. The second inappropriate site was at www.metamaze.com/s2m9.html. This site was am astrology webpage. It gave a listing of famous people in history and their astrological signs. It opened up with a quote that had sexual references. This site was definitely inappropriate for school-age children. Another site that I needed to reject was at www.mcb.ucdavis.edu/people/hemang/magellan.html. This was actually a cat’s webpage. The cat’s name was Magellan and his owner created an entire page about the cat including pictures and the cat’s daily activities. Some people must have lots of time on their hands to create a site just for their cat. Another site that would not be useful was at http://interprep.com/datebook/date0311.htm. This site was a datebook with humorous historical facts. Apparently, Magellan was a historical figure that they used in one of their jokes on this version of an online calendar. A site that was also completely irrelevant to what I was looking for was at http://magellan.mckinley.com/mckinley-txt/250.html. This site was called the Magellan Internet Guide. This site was actually a search engine. The final site that I would not be able to use was at www.lonelyplanet.com/dest/sea/phil.htm. This site was a tourist’s guide to the Philippines. This site included information about this area’s environment, culture, major attractions, etc. It even included a slide show. The only part mentioned about Ferdinand Magellan was that he claimed the Philippines for Spain. The first search engine that I chose from Webtaxi to use was Hotbot. I figured that I would try to use an engine that I never used before. It did retrieve a nice size amount of documents yet it had a very plain homepage. I guess if you compared it to search engines such as Lycos, it really does only what it is supposed to do-help you to find what you are looking for. It does include the percentage ratings of relevance. I did attempt to use Lycos as my second search engine but I was very disappointed. I will say that Lycos does have a terrific homepage, yet it retrieved 20,298 responses to my search. This was too many documents to browse! I actually began to look through them. The first two sites were outdated and the second two were unobtainable through this server. As a result, I gave up on Lycos and returned to my favorite search engine, Altavista. Altavista returned about 200 relevant documents and I had no problems retrieving the ones that I needed.