An official website of the United States government
In February 2021, Google Search added a new interface feature to support the evaluation of web domains, known as the “About this result” feature. A prominent part of this feature is a snippet of text pulled automatically from Wikipedia, if a Wiki page for the web domain exists. While conducting large-scale audits of Google Search, we discovered that less than 40% of web domains shown in Google Search results contain a Wikipedia page. Then, we retrieved their Wikidata entries and looked at the extent they incorporate features related to W3C credibility signals. The lack of information for many signals points out to avenues for expanding Wikidata coverage.
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Assessing Google Search’s New Features in Supporting Credibility Judgments of Unknown Websites
This study assesses the awareness and perceived utility of two features Google Search introduced in February 2021: “About this result” and “More about this page”. Google stated that the goal of these features is to help users vet unfamiliar web domains (or sources). We investigated whether the features were sufficiently prominent to be detected by frequent users of Google Search, and their perceived utility for making credibility judgments of sources, in one-on-one user studies with 25 undergraduate college students, who identify as frequent users of Google Search. Our results indicate a lack of adoption or awareness of these features by our participants and neutral-positive perceptions of their utility in evaluating web sources. We also examined the perceived usefulness of nine other domain credibility signals collected from the W3C.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1751087
- PAR ID:
- 10438929
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 303 to 307
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3576840.3578277
