Is Africa the dark continent? Is it the scenery,north African Egypt,deserts or travel that fascinates you? Do you desire travel? Maybe you can investigate your ancestors?



But how do you find the best information about Africa. The best solutions involve a voodoo recipe of several things: Ask your friends or neighbors ;Look it up in an encyclopedia . This is what you had to do in the 'olden' days: before the internet .

Yet if you begin your exploration at a library, public or private, you will find that the information on Africa is available by way of a computer, possibly the same internet that you have access to at your home.

There are at least two kinds of web resources that you will see over and over again: the first kind is a search engine, You use them, the old standards like Ask.com ,Yahoo Search! or newer ones like Quaero, ChaCha, Baidu or a directory of existing sites: like DMOZ, which use humans working as librarians to pour over the internet sites, find the ones dealing with Africa and sort them for you.

There are problems using these methods: Google's search engine strategy for African sites is strongly influenced by the web business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts to defeat Google's methods to increase a web site's back-links and hence make it seem bigger than it really is. This makes it harder to find the real good sources for information on Africa. SEO is big business for sites that get advertizing revenue on the web, because search engines can make or break a web site. There are good and bad people useing these techniques who have not the slightest interest in Africa. In fact, any search engine using computer algorithms to analyse text can ignore nuances in language like, searching for lectureship and get you tons of listings about 'learn acupuncture' , or even worse, a rock band with the name 'The giant African Membership". How many times haveyou had to dig down to the 21st page of the web search to find something really useful about Africa? More times than you wish!

A directory organized by humans like DMOZ may not have that kind of lanugage problem, but the editors of those directories are volunteers, with limited time and have to obey some odd rules about what constitutes an acceptable web site: some types of information rich sites can't even get listed. In fact, the decisions about what is good or not is under in the hands of a very few people rules that are just too rigid: a junior editor often has a decision overrulled by a higher ranking editor sometimes, for the most obscure reasons. They are well meaning, but can they really speak to be knowledgeable about all they do? The websites that are accepted may have to wait for months to get in , if ever. And the categories are limited, with few places to put new concepts. It takes months for a new category to be approved: if at all.

A surprisingly successful response has been the wikipedia, where everyone gets a shot at updating the site: and amazingly enough, wikipedia has a very good reputation of being accurate,authoritative and, well, generally useful.

As of September 2008, there is a new challenger in web site review directories that really does attempt to answer the question of which site is best, or at least as they put it: "which site has the most vava-voom!" That new site is , a web domain out of the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. Vava.vu will let any web site be entered to be rated by the general public and given the tag Africa. The grading is simple: a web site on Africa has a rank and a 'statistical strength' associated with it: When someone visits vava.vu, those sites with weaker strength are put side by side, and it is up to the visitor to say which site of the two is more useful. When enough votes are cast, the visitor will see the real top ten sites about Africa : These sites are the ones that you, the public has given the green lite to. The idea is honest in that a visitor only can compare two sites at a time: one will win and one will not. A visitor can't give a yea or nay to one site by itself because that would skew the results. Some sites will consistantly prevail over other sites.

So if you are interested in Africa , you can go find the answers in several areas: Locally in the library, from friends, or on the internet at your favorite search engine, a directory like DMOZ or wikipedia. Or with the new alternative on the block: