Search engine credibility

@CailinJohnson

“They found that users tend to look at results ranked higher than one they click on more often than they look at results ranked lower…” (Carterette and Jones p.1) When first searching I thought that the most relevant and credible results would show up at the top of my search results. However that is not what I found with the worldcat site. If I did not already know that the WSUV worldcat site was a library search engine I would have questioned it credibility because only one the results on the first page was relevant to my search topic. Also the only result that was relevant was the 4th result on the page. To me this makes the site seem like it does not have relevant results for my search and is not credible. The Wikipedia website gave a lot of information on the topic and gave quite a few examples of what locative art is. Also the references were published literature instead of websites; Leonardo’s Electronic Almanac was even referenced on Wikipedia. The only thing that makes me question the Wikipedia results is knowing that it is a free site that can be edited by anyone, however if I did not know this I would think that the site gave a credible search result. Leonardo’s Electronic Almanac fits the quote above which states that users look at results ranked higher because the only relevant result on the page was the first result. The other results did not seem relevant. The result that was relevant had a lot of the same information that popped up on Wikipedia. This similarity made each of the sites seem credible.

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