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Not so sure. When I'm looking for information on, say, WWII history, I can't ask someone or go on a trusted website like when I'm looking for information on a f
by ramchip 17y ago
Not so sure. When I'm looking for information on, say, WWII history, I can't ask someone or go on a trusted website like when I'm looking for information on a field I'm familiar with. I don't have any acquaintance or favourite websites already, which is why I'm using a search engine.
The large amount of [quiz,farm,friend of the day] spam on my facebook, and the various hoax chain letters my not-too-web-savvy aunt sends us sometimes, also make me a little jaded on the value of 'social $whatever' for information gathering.
- GHFigs 17y agoWWII history, I can't ask someone or go on a trusted website like when I'm looking for information on a field I'm familiar with. WWII history isn't such a hot topic for crapflooding, either. Search is still useful there. You're also still applying trust heuristics based on the results--"battle of the coral sea" returns results from Wikipedia, history.navy.mil, worldwar2history.info, history.sandiego.edu, etc. You probably have some idea about the content of each. Ultimately your decisions about what to click come down to your perception of trust in their authors' ability to provide you the information you desire. I'm just guessing, but I suspect most people here are familiar with the phenomenon of doing a Google search only to end up clicking on the Wikipedia result that invariably makes it into the top few results. This is a sign that Google's PageRank still aligns reasonably well with our own estimation of trust for those search terms. As for social whatevers: that's why I said "People you trust to not provide you with crap." You can't trust most people to do that. Least of all when given a megaphone and/or a financial incentive.