In Google We Trust

from the if-Google-says-so... dept

You can certainly question whether or not this study has a large enough or varied enough sample size (22 students from the same university), but the results were that the students studied appear to have something of a blind-trust in the authority of Google. That is, if Google deems a certain site to be more relevant based on a higher search engine ranking, the students often accepted that view -- even if sites that showed up lower in the results were actually much more relevant. This really isn't that surprising (or disturbing). After all, Google is often quite a good judge of relevance, and so there's value in trusting it to be right most of the time in its rankings. It helps people function faster, rather than having to verify everything carefully -- and in most cases, that's probably okay. As long as people realize the situations when they actually do need to verify things more carefully, it doesn't seem all that worrisome that kids use Google's rankings as a reasonable short cut in judging relevance.

Filed Under: google search results, trust
Companies: google