Is Africa full of adventure? Is it the deserts,culture,people or travel that fascinates you? Do you want travel? Maybe you can investigate your roots?

But how do you find the best information about Africa. The best solutions involve a combination of several things: Take a class at a university;Go to the library;Look it up in an encyclopedia . This is what you had to do long ago: before the information superhighway.

Yet when you begin your quest at a library, you will find that much of the information on Africa is available via computer, possibly the same internet that you have access to at your home.

There are a few 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 or newer ones like Wikiseek , 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 categorize them for you.

There are some troubles with either of these tactics: Google's search engine strategy for African sites is highly influenced by the internet business of SEO (search engine optimization) which attempts to defeat Google's methods to increase a web site's visibility and so 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 make money on the web, because search engines can make or break a web site. There are 'black hat' and 'white hat' people useing these techniques who have not the slightest interest in Africa. In fact, any search engine using computer algorithms to analyse text can totally ignore ambiguities of language for example, searching for lectureship and may get you tons of listings about 'learn acupuncture' , or even worse, a rock band with the name 'The giant African Power Cords". How many times haveyou had to dig down to the fifth page of the web search to find something really useful about Africa? More often than you wish!

A directory organized by humans like DMOZ will not suffer 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 appropriate 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 control 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 weeks to get in , if ever. And the categories are limited, with no place to put new concepts. It takes months for a category to be approved.

A very successful alternative is the wikipedia, where everyone gets a shot at updating the site: and amazingly enough, wikipedia does a very good job of being appropriate, informative,authoritative and, well, generally useful.

Now, in September 2008, there is a new challenger in web site ranking directories that uses the power of democracy 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 operation is simple: a web site about 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 public to say which of the two is better. 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 fair 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 win out over lesser 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: