Advanced Web Evaluation
Using Faganfinder's URLinfo
Faganfinder allows you to find out specific information about a website that might be hard to learn from the site itself. This information includes things like the name and address of the person who registered the URL, the pages that link to the site, the rankings of the site, and similar pages.
To use Faganfinder's URLinfo, enter the URL of the site you're interested in learning more about in the search bar.
Alexa shows basic information such as the information for the company that owns the domain and the traffic rank for the site. Well respected sites often have higher traffic, though really good hoax sites sometimes have high traffic rank too.
Whois gives you information about the person who registered the URL and their address. There are some "proxy" services that will register URLs for other individuals. This can be to protect people's privacy or because there is something wrong with the information on the website. It's worth thinking about why a website might have a proxy service register their URL for them.
This allows you to see all the pages that link to the one you are considering. Do reliable sites link to it? Do they link to the site saying it's a good one or a bad one?
Alexa allows you to see pages that are similar to the one you're examining. This can be useful because many times a hoax site is listed as similar to other hoax sites.
The Internet Archive allows you to see how the site has evolved over time, and when the site originated.