WebInfoPro is dedicated to enabling Information Professionals to retrieve, analyse and capitalise upon information found on the Internet. Arguably the key factor that limits the usefulness of Internet-derived information is its propensity to exhibit bias. The utility of an Information Professional to his or her clients is therefore always going to be limited unless he/she has an approach to dealing with bias that is robust to scrutiny.

There are two main issues that an Information Professional must handle when dealing with bias on the Internet. The first is that he/she may take an approach that is epistemologically naive - treating information derived from the Internet without proper regard for biases that permeate it. The concomitant risk is that the conclusions he/she draws from the information are unreliable or inapplicable to the client's needs. The second issue is that he/she may take an approach that is over-cautious with regard to bias. The risk here is that whilst endaevouring to remove bias, the Information Professional throws away information that would have been useful if it could have been captured.

The previous paragraph describes two extremes of behaviour. Of course, there is a whole spectrum between these two extremes. Given the obvious problems with taking the approaches associated with either extreme, the Information Professional might be tempted to tread a path midway between naivety and cautiousness. Surely this enables him/her to get the best of both worlds? Unfortunately this is not necessarily so. In fact, such an Information Professional risks getting the worst parts of each of the two extremes! He/she may throw away some useful information, and still not have a proper analysis of what biases remain in his/her conclusions. This website aims to enable the Information Professional to take a different, holistic, approach to bias, that maximises both the robustness of the conclusions he/she draws, as well as the amount of information extracted from web research.