College students not so smart at Internet research

 

[caption id="attachment_11461" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Google"][/caption]

 Carol Forsloff - Fighting for top positions in Google might work out for businesses who work hard to get
there, but is that the way knowledge should be driven, given that many students
rely on the first few pages for their information?




It is a reasonable question since Google position is driven not by substance but
by certain search engine optimization tools and rules as well as popularity of
the page itself, which could simply be a cute video of someone getting ready
for work in the morning.

Young
people give Google, other top brand search results too much credibility.  Researchers say they aren’t as savvy as folks
think.

Northwestern
University did a study of how many students do their research and found that
many students only click on websites that are actually at the top of Google
searches.  They also search for other
brand-name websites and searches.

The study
was published by the International Journal of Communication.

"Many
students think, ‘Google placed it number one, so, of course it's
credible,'" said Eszter Hargittai,
associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern. "This is
potentially tricky because Google doesn't rank a site by its credibility."

 102 students at the University of Illinois at
Chicago were party of the study and sat at computers with researchers.  Each student was asked to bring up the web
page they used to start browsing the Internet.
Their responses were captured on video as researchers gave students a
variety of information to research.
Google came up the most dominant research tool.

Previous
university research also shows students use Wikipedia for preliminary research,
although they may substantiate what they find by using other material as well.

What
was particular interesting was that students often didn’t even know the website
before they began funneling the information into some documentable form.

"Search
engine rankings seem extremely important," Hargittai said. “We found that
a website’s layout or content almost didn’t even matter to the students. What
mattered is that it was the number one result on Google."

Aside
from Google, other online brands that students mentioned most often to complete
tasks were: Yahoo!, SparkNotes, MapQuest, Microsoft, Wikipedia, AOL and Facebook.

Some
of the students did give more credibility to websites ending in dot-gov,
dot-edu or dot-org.

Hargittai
said most didn't know dot-org domain names could be registered by anyone, and

thus are not inherently different from dot-com sites.