How the Interplay of Google and Wikipedia Affects Perceptions of Online News Sources

Nowmore than ever, people are encountering unfamiliar news sites on the web through social media and other online platforms. Thus, it is very important that people are able to examine the credibility of news sources efficiently and effectively. To enable beneficial credibility assessments, web literacy experts are suggesting that users engage in “lateral reading”, the process of verifying the credibility of a news source by searching for third-party information about it. The popularity of Google’s search engine makes it a popular choice for users engaging in the lateral reading process. However, little is known about the ways the composition of the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP) affects users’ credibility assessments. The SERP is composed of organic results, as well as several other panels of information. In this paper, we present two user studies in which we asked participants to make assumptions about the credibility of a news source based only on its Google SERP. Our findings suggest that the presence of Knowledge Panel features is perceived to be important to participants’ credibility determinations. Further, we discuss theWikipedia-focused initiative launched as a response to the first study summarized in this paper. This initiative has the potential to help users correctly identify legitimate local newspapers.