• Content
• Authority
• Information maintenance
• Presentation
• Availability
• Cost

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Content When evaluating websites, we are concerned primarily with high-quality content. To evaluate the quality of a site's content, we ask these questions:

• What is the scope of the content?
• Who is the intended audience?
• What is its purpose?
• Is it up to date?
• Is it accurate (as far as we can determine)?

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Authority The Web is a peculiarly democratic medium, allowing many people to make information available to the world. We at Internet Scout support the involvement of as broad a constituency as possible, but we also try to ascertain the authority of website creators within the subject area. Questions we consider include:

• Who is the author (this is crucial, in that we rarely select anonymous pages)?
• Is the author likely to be authoritative (as far as we can tell)?

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Information maintenance This criterion relates to content in the crucial category of whether the site is "alive"; that is, whether it is maintained/updated on a regular basis. Sites don't necessarily have to be kept up to date if they are clearly labeled as archive sites. However, if we look at a site that hasn't been touched in a year and it isn't specifically designated an archive, we are not likely to select it for inclusion.
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Presentation As browser and HTML advances allow greater flexibility in the creation of web pages, we evaluate sites on the basis of utilitarian concerns; while flashy design is not necessarily a drawback, users must be able to make effective use of the site. Questions we consider include:

• How is the site organized?
• Is it easy to navigate?
• Does it depend on graphics, and if so does the provider maintain a separate, text-only version?
• Will the pages take an inordinately long time to load on machines with slow connections?
• Do users need specific helper applications to take full advantage of the site (we inform readers of such requirements)?
• Does the site deliver content in a well organized fashion?
• Is the site pleasant to look at, stylistically and graphically?

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Availability This may seem trivial, but it is important to check links at a site randomly. If some or most of them don't work, we won't select the site for inclusion. It is crucial that the links at the site (not to mention the site itself) can be reached. We check the main page of each site for availability at least three times in the days before the Scout Report is released.
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Cost We have no set policy on this, but we take a very critical look at for-fee sites, because payment requirements tend to discriminate against many would-be users, especially those in education.
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