Poor Quality of Online Searches Made People Believe Possible Misinformation, Revealed by Study

In the last few years, the trend of getting information through online search has increased. However, the results obtained from searching for any information on the Internet can sometimes be wrong. There have been many cases in which wrong information obtained through online search has caused great harm.

One Study It has been found that people who search online to verify the veracity of potentially false information often assume that the information is true due to the poor quality results provided by search engines. This has increased the challenge for online search engines to prevent false information from appearing at the top of search results. This study has been conducted by a research team from the University of Central Florida, New York University and Stanford University in the US. Its goal was to understand the impact of the results obtained when people use search engines to find out the veracity of a news item.

The findings of this study published in the journal Nature highlight the need for media literacy programmes. It also says that search engines will have to invest in solutions to the challenges found in this study. Zeve Sanderson, executive director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University, said, “Our study shows that searching online to find out the truth of news increases the belief in more popular misinformation and this happens in large quantities.”

In this study, researchers evaluated people’s behavior after reading recent and a few months old news articles. This included a combination of false or misleading information and confirmed news on topics like Corona. This included false but popular articles on Corona vaccine, impeachment proceedings against Trump and climate-related events. Researchers found that users who searched online to verify the veracity of news articles, particularly those containing misleading or false information, were more likely to trust the information when search engines returned poor-quality results.

(This news has not been edited by the NDTV team. It has been published directly from the Syndicate feed.)