Introduction
The www.agriculture.gov.ie website also has another important feature found on many sites, a search facility. This can make finding the information you require much faster as you can immediately input the term you are looking for, without having to go through the links provided by the site.
Suppose we are looking for information on planning for retirement and its financial implications for farmers. If ‘Retirement’ is typed into the search facility a number of articles appear.
We should get these results:
Here, each link mentioned has a mark out of 100 for relevance. If we click on the first link (with a relevance of 70%), we are given the following screen:
Once again, we can see the amount of information available and the value of the Internet both as a means of retrieving information and obtaining official forms.
We have now looked at one site www.agriculture.gov.ie in some detail both by following the links it provides and using its own search facility. This site is one with a great deal of information for Irish farmers and worth a detailed look. As this is a Government website it does not suffer from problems of irrelevance associated with many commercial websites and is regularly updated.
