We often feel that young people are the most tech savvy among us and for many things that is true.  But just how savvy are they when it comes to searching and judging the information they find?  I ran across a study by business professor Bing Pan, Ph.D. at the College of Charleston, examining the skill level of younger folks in online research.  The core of his research was asking a group of college students to look up the answers to a handful of questions.  In doing so, the students generally relied on the web pages that appeared at the top of Google's results list.  What the students didn't know is that the "results" had been manipulated, so the results at the top weren't the most relevant or correct.  What?  "Google" was misleading?  None of the students questioned the results or searched deeper by checking the authors' credentials.

I found myself experiencing the "relying on what the search said" several years ago when looking at potential houses with my just out of college daughter.  While she had everything carefully mapped out in her GPS, we sometimes rode  through blocks and blocks when, if we had just looked down the street, our next destination was right there. 

Now I'm an optimist at heart and a pretty trusting soul, but because I'm older I have a healthy skepticism of what I find online.  I believe that judgment of found information is vital.  Critical thinking applies and of course internet searches are key to everyday problem-solving, but without applied skepticism of the credibility of results and critical thinking, it borders on stupid.

There are enough intricacies in the search world of how research should be taught.  Taking Page Ranks as gospel isn't good for anyone, young or old.  There are ways to evaluate the relevance and reliability of web pages/sites fairly quickly by looking at the URL (address line) and observing things like if the results are from a personal page, if the results are from a trusted education source, if the company or author's domain is consistent with the type of information you would expect.  So if you're thinking that there are some things you'd like to learn and you have access to a bright young person in your office, offer to share your healthy, broad knowledge with them in exchange for them showing you how to disable something annoying on your smart phone.  Challenge why they rely on the answers they found.

I think back to the famous cartoon published in the New Yorker way back in 1993...two dogs sitting before a terminal looking at a computer screen; one says to the other "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."   That's the rationale for evaluating carefully whatever you find on the web. The burden is on us - the reader - to establish the validity, authorship, timeliness and integrity of what we find.  So if we want to use it for serious research, it's best to cultivate the habit of healthy skepticism and questioning what we find with critical thinking.