How Trustworthy Is The Web?How Trustworthy Is The Web?

My eleven-year-old daughter loves Wikipedia. Just loves it. Give her an assignment that requires research, and that site is her first stop. And no matter how much I have cautioned her, she takes everything she finds there as gospel truth.When I did a reality check last Friday on some Wikipedia data my daughter had dug up about an obscure early French explorer, I found something interesting. Curious to see how Wikipedia information jibed with that from other sites, I did a--what else?--Google search, only to find that most other sites had simply copied the Wikipedia entry. Word for word, in many cases. In short: even if eventually corrected, erroneous information put into Wikipedia had already been propagated throughout the Web. Worse, that means that less sophisticated researchers--like my daughter--could easily conclude that the sheer volume of corroboration from multiple sources meant that the information must be true.

My experience--admittedly anecdotal--is backed up by several independent studies published recently that brought home two key facts: first, people are increasingly dependent on Web searches to find important information. Secondly, the vast majority of people don't question the accuracy or timeliness of what they find there.

In other words, there's a growing reliance on blind faith to make often-critical decisions.

The studies largely focused on health data. The conclusion of a widely reported study by Australian researchers was that doctors trying to correctly diagnose difficult cases should turn to Google for an answer. Physicians at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane chose three to five search terms for 26 illnesses the New England Journal had listed as particularly difficult to diagnosis. A Google search on each resulted in correct diagnoses almost 60 percent of the time.

Although a 40 percent error rate might not sound comforting if you're suffering from a mysterious mix of symptoms, in fact, researchers concluded that using the Web as an aid to traditional means of diagnosing more obscure diseases--read: individual doctors' knowledge and printed reference materials--has become an essential tool in modern health care.

But before you celebrate that all this expert knowledge is literally at our fingertips, you should know about another study released last week by The Pew Internet Project. Only 25 percent of Americas who already use the Web to get health advice check the sources and dates of the data they find there.

How many people are we talking about? Plenty. According to a study by Forrester Research, a full 38 percent of online consumers sought medical advice from the Web in 2006, compared to 30 percent in 2003. According to the Pew Study, on a single day in August 2006--the date on which its research was based--that was 10 million Americans. Annually, that adds up to more than 3.6 billion consumers who may be being steered in the wrong direction.

What do you think? How dependent are you on the Web for doing primary research, whether for business or personal reasons? More importantly, what can we do--perhaps through education, watchdog groups, and better search technology--to help improve our ability to separate the informational wheat from the chaff? Let me know by responding here.