Unlimited Jargon

Locating Geography Facts on the web.

Find out the diameter of the earth?

Finding out information about countries, people and places is not too difficult unless you are looking for something very specific.

Here are some UJ top tips:

1. Construct a good search term.
Lets say in this example we are looking for the number of people in London. The obvious search term to use would be "population" "London". Depending on which search engine you use the results may vary. I found Google attempted to offer a figure automatically, however from an unreliable source, and the site I think provides the best answer is:

The UK National Statistics site.

2. Check the validity of all sites. The above search provided me with several different figures. Try and cross check statistics with other pages. A good way of doing this is to find a statistic such as "7,172,000" with some information it relates to "London" "population" and see if other sites verify it.

Yahoo worked best for me with this strategy, but it should work with any search engine.

3. Start at sites you already know.

If you are researching London, a good approach may be to go directly to sites you already know are useful such as Wikipedia and searching or navigating to the appropriate page.

You could do a similar thing with Craig's list.

If you are stuck for good geography sites check out some of these the next time you need to research something geographical:

World Atlas
The CIA world factbook
geography.about.com
and even more sites at:
The Yahoo directory Geography pages

Happy hunting.

Answer 12756.3 KM from the world factbook

Labels: Research

posted by Caesar on Thursday, August 17, 2006