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

In the last few years, the trend of obtaining information through online search has increased. However, the results obtained from searching for any information on the Internet may sometimes be wrong. There have been many cases in which wrong information obtained from online searches has caused major losses.

A study has found that people who search online to confirm the veracity of potentially false information often assume that information to be true due to the poor quality results received from search engines. This increases the challenge for online search engines to prevent misinformation from appearing at the top of search results. This study has been done by the research team of University of Central Florida, New York University and Stanford University in America. Its goal was to understand the impact of the results people get from using search engines to find out the truth of a news.

The findings of this study published in the journal Nature highlight the need for media literacy programs. Along with this, it has been said that search engines will have to invest in solutions to the challenges revealed in this study. Zeve Sanderson, executive director of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics, said, “Our study shows that online searches to determine news authenticity increase belief in more popular misinformation, and by large amounts.” It happens.”

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. It contained inaccurate but popular articles on Corona vaccine, impeachment proceedings against Trump and climate related events. Researchers in this study found that users who searched online to determine the veracity of news articles, particularly those containing misleading or inaccurate information, were more likely to believe the information when search engines returned low-quality results. .

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