People searching the Internet for information are more likely to find the correct
answer than a wrong one. The catch is that you鈥檙e most likely not to find an answer
at all. Researchers at Ohio State University in Columbus (Reference and user
Services Quarterly, vol 38, p 360) used search engines to carry out keyword
searches on 60 simple questions, such as 鈥淲hat is the population of Cloumbus,
Ohio?鈥, and found that 64 per cent of Web pages either didn鈥檛 contain the answer
or no longer existed. Of the remainder, 27 per cent had the correct information. The
others were wrong.
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