A clean appearance has always been the basis of the aesthetic of the search engine. The ability to return remarkably accurate results is one of the reasons why many people love the company. The simplicity of the home page is not new. The way that the corporation returns information has changed over time. The changes go largely unrecognized by the millions of users who rely on the search engine daily.
A list of hyperlinked websites was returned when queries were returned. The format changed slowly. Businesses are able to buy space at the top and tailor their returns to maximize product placement with the first of its kind in the world. Correcting spelling, providing summaries of the news under the headlines and anticipating our queries were some of the things it did by the early 2000s. Universal Search was started in 2007. Knowledge Graph was introduced in 2012 and is a source of knowledge that many of us have come to rely on exclusively when it comes to quick searches.
Research shows that many of the design changes are related to the properties of the internet giant. The goal is to provide direct answers instead of just showing a few blue links. By adding all of these features, as well as competitors such as DuckDuckGo and Bing, which also summarize content, has effectively changed the experience from an explorative search environment to a platform designed around verification.
If you are looking for a simple fact like how many ounces make up a gallon, then it is not much of a problem. Many rely on search engines to find more complicated information. My research shows that this shift can lead to incorrect returns that disrupt democratic participation, confirm false claims, and are easy to spread.
If a person asked when the North Dakota caucus would be during the 2020 presidential election, the wrong information was highlighted by the search engine. The firehouse caucus was held on March 10, 2020 and the Republican convention was held on the 28th. Users who notice discrepancies can't flag errors for review.
The public can be misled by summaries from the internet. Conservative politicians and pundits spread lies that the rioters were anti-Trumpers in order to make them look like they were responsible for the violence. On the day of the attack, The Washington Times ran an article titled "Facial Recognition Identifies Extremists Storming the Capitol", which was perpetuated on the House floor and on social media.
The Washington Times issued a correction to the article after the FBI found no evidence to support the claims. As of this writing, the original article with the headline "Facial Recognition Identifies Extremists Storming the Capitol" is the top return. The ones that were identified as extremists were highlighted in the summary by the search engine. The long-term effects of perpetrating these falsehoods have been described by those who studied them. More than 20 percent of Republican voters still blame antiFA for the violence that took place that day.
Many users still rely on Google to fact-check information, and doing so might make them believe in false claims. The people I spoke with for my research believed that the top search returns were more important than the news and they trusted them more than the news. Many people said the Knowledge Graph was the only source they used, but that was not true. People tend to search for things they see on Facebook or other social media platforms in order to do their own research, but because of the way content has been tagged and categorized, they are falling into an information trap.
The Ikae effect of misinformation is what I refer to in my book. Business scholars have found that when consumers build their own merchandise, they feel more competent and happier with their purchase. The same strategy is being used by conspiracy theorists and propagandists to give a do-it-yourself quality to their information. Independently conducting a search on a given topic makes audiences feel like they are engaged in an act of self-discovery when they are actually participating in a scavenger hunt engineered by those spreading the lies.
As a heated mid-term season approaches, users need to re-think their thinking on how information is returned to them and what they think of the search engine. We need to apply the same scrutiny to information on social media that we have done to returns. You will likely get the same information if you go to the exact same website as you did on the social networking site. It isn't more reliable just because it's from a search engine. We should take a bit more time to explore the information that has been returned to us, but we need to be aware of the words we start with. Rather than relying on quick answers to difficult questions, take the time to click on the links, do a bit of research, and read information from a variety of sources. Start the search again, but from a different point of view, to see how small changes in the language affect your results.
Something could be just a click away if we don't think about it.
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