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The trouble with Google and other search engines...
Which search engine do you regularly use? Is it Google? That's not surprising. The link below takes you to an interactive graph from Statista that shows just how heavily Google dominates the market.
With over 4 billion users worldwide, Google is used by half of the world's population.
When you search using Google, you are searching the open internet. By open, we mean that it is a place for experimentation. You can create an entire website, and it doesn't change the network or affect other users who aren't interacting with your site. Literally, anyone can add anything to the open internet. Assume that you need to verify the credibility of everything that you encounter. Not to mention that Google's algorithms, targeted advertising, and ranked searching combine to show you what Google wants you to see and what Google thinks that you want to see. This can further contribute to confirmation bias.
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One easy step to verify credibility for many sites is by looking at the URL and determining who created it (i.e. .edu = education, .org = nonprofit organization, .com = commercial site).
Search Engine Experiment
The pictures below are the returned results of 4 different individuals. For this example, we used the search terms:
self-driving cars opinion articles
Notice where our results are the same and different down to the number of results returned, the articles featured, and the odd commercial result.
Meghan - Bing (Private Search)
