From PC World:
"University students may be encouraged to be critical but they don't seem to question Google's ranking system, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
The experiment involved 22 undergraduate students (with various majors) from Cornell University in the U.S. It found that overall, the students had an inherent trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query.
"When participants selected a link from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position, even if that content was less relevant to the search query," states the report. "
Read the news bite here; the whole study can be found here.
Hat tip: Melissa Rohlfs, Office of Communications.
