The study, published by the International Journal of Communication, described the pitfalls of the trust students place in Google and the search engine’s rankings. A recent study, however, shows that you young people may not be as savvy as you think when it comes to online research. You already know all about the technology gap, and probably have little faith in your instructors’ web know-how when compared to your own. The main criteria students looked at when choosing which sites to find their information on were where those sites were ranked in Google and other popular search engines like Yahoo!.
According to the press release for the study, one student responded that they chose a particular site because it was the first to come up in Google. If you follow the blog, you may remember our tip to use Wikipedia as a starting point only when beginning research; the user-edited Encyclopedia should never be used as a reference. Researchers from Northwestern University looked at 102 University of Illinois at Chicago students to determine how they went about their research when given a number of information-seeking tasks. They also placed little weight on more reputable sites ending in dot-gov or dot-edu, for example, when compared to dot-com pages.
The student was unable to describe much else about that site. Other sites the students said they relied on to complete tasks included SparkNotes, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Anything you do find there should be fact-checked elsewhere.
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