Students Blindly Follow Top Google Results [ArsTechnica]
Only about ten percent of the students mentioned the author of the research they found. One positive note – most of the students did mention that certain sites (such as those with .gov or .edu domains) were more reliable than others.
It's interesting that the students in the survey seemed more interested in evaluating the reliability of a particular search engine than the results it delivered for a particular search. Northwestern's research found that most students were more concerned with the trustworthiness of the search engine than the actual sites the engine provided for them. When asked, the students tended to focus on the reliability of Google or the professionalism of Microsoft, with very little attention paid to the actual sites they were researching.
Even though Google is only just over 10 years old and Yahoo is just a few years older, there's a generation of current college students that have grown up using search engines to conduct research. But are these students thinking critically about the search results that these search engines are serving up to them?
Northwestern University recently conducted a study to test students’ relationships with the search engines they use every day. The study focused on 102 college freshmen and found that the majority of students clicked the very first search result regardless of how related it was to their search topic.
The test focused primarily on Google, but also observed searches from other sites, such as Yahoo, Sparknotes, Mapquest, Bing, Wikipedia, AOL, and Facebook.Only about ten percent of the students mentioned the author of the research they found. One positive note – most of the students did mention that certain sites (such as those with .gov or .edu domains) were more reliable than others.
It's interesting that the students in the survey seemed more interested in evaluating the reliability of a particular search engine than the results it delivered for a particular search. Northwestern's research found that most students were more concerned with the trustworthiness of the search engine than the actual sites the engine provided for them. When asked, the students tended to focus on the reliability of Google or the professionalism of Microsoft, with very little attention paid to the actual sites they were researching.
Comments