I chose to analyze the "Victorian Robots" website, and based upon an initial glance of the URL's structure, I would conjecture that the website represents an amateur source with good intentions. I really know nothing about Victorian robots, and I assume that the entire subject is a little far-fetched. However, the intermittent grammar mistakes and poor formatting within the website lead me to make the initial assumption that I should take all the information on the site with a grain of salt.
As for embedded and external links attached to this website, all of them seem to be funneling to a comic book company source website. All of the attached links' formats and designs appear the same as the "Victorian Robots" URL, so I am assuming all of this information was composed and posted by the same entity. For me, this lowers the degree of credibility for the website. While all of the information seems to be based on comic books and science-fiction/fantasy, I usually do not trust unfamiliar websites that only provide links within their own database or infrastructure. I want to see where all of the information is coming from outside of the source.
After performing a search on "Victorian Robots" in Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, I found that all three of the search engines produce my chosen URL as the top source for the topic. The list of links and information then goes on to provide images relating to the search (some located on the original URL) and additional websites focusing on Victorian robots in descending relevance. Among the three search engines, the results were basically formatted and presented the same; however, both Bing and Yahoo! produced millions of more URLs than Google. I am not sure, but I would venture to say that this disparity in amount of sources has to do with Google's increased screening and filtering of websites. Basically, I would guess that Google has the least amount of hits because it refines the search the most thoroughly. Bing was the only search engine that produced any advertisements stemming from the topic. On the side of the search panel were two insignificant links to "Victorian Boot" sales from shoe venders. I would imagine the shortage of the usual advertisements can be explained by the oddity that is my search topic. Advertisements from search engines feed off of relevant hits from your topic, so not many contemporary advertisement hits will show up for 19th century robots.
I attempted to identify the publisher, which I am pretty sure is bigredhair.com, but the domain of the URL was not yet registered with easywhois.com. In order for me to register the domain and receive any information on the URL's publisher, I had to pay a fee of $15. However, the simple fact that the domain is not registered and doesn't bring up any information lets me know that the website probably isn't credible enough for academic purposes.
From what I can gather, the purpose of this particular URL is to essentially inform viewers about the mythical/historical data behind robots during the Victorian period of history. The URL seems to be a spinoff or small portion of the much larger parent site of bigredhair comics. I am still unsure whether the true purpose of the site is to promote the parent website's comic sales or simply to inform viewers about this particular topic. The entire website and all of its links were created by one woman, so I must take every piece of information presented for granted. Ultimate, I believe the "Victorian Robot" website was created simply to function as a fun link from the parent site. The parent site, bigredhair.com, is set up like a carnival where every link is a new ride or adventure in a sense. So, the Victorian robots URL seems to simply be a side-show. Since the purpose of this URL is essentially to present information, I cannot necessarily label the site as credible or trustworthy because it has one author whom I am not familiar with. There are no links of justification or research backing the information presented. The website seems to combine entertainment with information, and, while I feel like this site is harmless and fun, it probably isn't the best source for legitimate information regarding 19th-century electronics.
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