Effects of search interface and Internet-specific epistemic beliefs on source evaluations during Web search for medical information: an eye-tracking study

The present study examined how both the interface of search engines and Internet-specific epistemic beliefs influence novices' source evaluations during Web search on a medical topic. A standard Google-like list interface was compared to a tabular interface that presented search results grouped according to objective, subjective, or commercial information in order to provide users with affordances for source evaluations. Results revealed that university students using the tabular interface paid less visual attention to commercial search results and selected objective search results more often and commercial ones less often than students using the list interface. Furthermore, the epistemic belief that the Web contains (among other types of information) correct knowledge was related to an increased selection of objective search results and to longer fixations on non-selected search results. Moreover, epistemic beliefs moderated the effects of the search interface, such that students with strong beliefs that the Web contains correct knowledge showed a more focused information selection and better search outcomes in terms of their argumentative summaries when using the tabular interface than when using the list interface. In contrast, these effects were not found for students with doubts about the Web containing correct knowledge.