Students Lack Search Engine Savviness

It seems that students nowadays have become so used to the thought of the top being the best that they failed to see that the said notion doesn’t apply to search engine results.

A paper published in the International Journal of Communication revealed that in doing research, most students automatically click on the first generated result without so much as a second though on the source’s credibility. Out of the 102 college freshmen that were included in the study, only 10 percent acknowledge the author or the author’s credentials, while zero of the students actually verified the qualifications of their sources.

The solution that was offered to this problem fell on the educators. It was suggested that professors should inform students about the websites that are credible and the ones that are not. Still though, we think that students are already being spoon-fed with enough stuff and teaching them to scroll down further in the search page shouldn’t be part of the curriculum.

[via ArsTechnica]

Search Engines Dive Deeper to Reel Users In

In an age where a billion-dollar company can come crashing down even before you can say “refresh,” Internet companies, even the giant search engines are doing everything they can to incorporate themselves in every aspect of people’s lives in order to remain relevant.

MSN recently introduced Bing Entertainment, Google is butting in everyone’s business by getting into Social Networking and Travel, and Yahoo… well, the big Purple exclamation point is gearing towards a more subtle approach.

According to their researchers in Barcelona, they are looking into tailor-fitting search results to fit an individual’s demographic information (age, gender, education). After all, there are a lot of ambiguous search terms out there, and the relevance of these terms largely depends on a person’s background. For instance, “women searching for ‘wagner’ probably wants the 18th-century German composer, while for men in the US ‘wagner’ is a paint sprayer.”

Moreover, search engines may also start playing “follow the cursor” as research apparently indicates that 70% of users move the mouse with the text that they’re following on screen. So what will their cursor spying mean for us? Well, being able to track what people are interested in reading will allow companies to place more appropriate ads on a certain page.

[via NewScientist and Search Engine Reviews]