In this year's course we will be looking at how people make credibility judgments when searching on the web. Users have been shown to be both unreliable and uncertain when identifying credible information on the web (Kattenbeck & Elsweiler, 2019), a situation not helped by misconceptions about how rankings are created (Unkel and Haas, 2017).
In this class we will study this behaviour in great detail. In particular we will look at ways in which credibility judgements can be influenced by the search engine and how this can be exploited to improve judgments people make.
Kattenbeck, M., & Elsweiler, D. (2019). Understanding credibility judgements for web search snippets. Aslib Journal of Information Management.
Haas, A., & Unkel, J. (2017). Ranking versus reputation: perception and effects of search result credibility. Behaviour & Information Technology, 36(12), 1285-1298.