Analyzing the effects of document's opinion and credibility on search behaviors and belief dynamics

Abstract

To obtain accurate information through web searches, people have to search for information carefully. This study investigates how the search behaviors and decision outcomes of searchers were affected by the documents they encountered during their search process. We focus on two document factors: (1) opinion (consistent and inconsistent) with the searchers' beliefs prior to the search task, and (2) credibility (high and low). We conducted a user study in which 260 participants were asked to perform health-related search tasks while controlling a search result with different opinions and credibility levels. The results revealed that (i) the participants spent more effort searching by issuing more queries, when belief-inconsistent documents were presented; (ii) the documents' opinion and credibility affected their belief dynamics, (i.e., how their beliefs changed after the search task); and (iii) their belief dynamics and search efforts had few relationships. These findings suggest that search engines could prevent users from polarization and thus, help them to obtain accurate information, by presenting documents that are inconsistent with users' beliefs on the higher-rank of the results.