With COP24 coming to a close at the end of this week, climate change has been relatively newsworthy which likely means that people are more likely to use their favorite search engine to search for information related to climate change. In a recent survey by the Association for Canadian Studies, Canadians reported that they believe the Internet makes them smarter, and they feel they do not have to remember facts or events because they can so easily search them online.
But is it wise to trust search engines as information sources? A growing number of critical information scholars, including Safiya Noble would say otherwise. In honor of COP24, I decided to test the two most popular search engines on the topic of climate change. I entered “climate change is” into both Google, Yahoo and Bing and took screen capture images of their suggested searches. The differences were very interesting.
Continue reading “A case for information literacy: Climate edition”
