3.2.1 Search engines dependency proves

“This part needs additional information and improvements and is then not finished
yet.”

This is not the studies which are lacking on this topic. When looking for
information regarding information literacy on the Internet you arrive on different
sources of studies and this regarding all the countries of the world. Information
literacy is a relevant topic and an issue. I focused on some very recent and
francophone research that I found on the Internet regarding Canadian students18,
French19 and Belgium students20. I also found information regarding Germany on this
topic. Many sources are as well saying that such research have been made in mostly
all Europe, China (Hong Kong)21 and the United States22.
All the studies I found until now (all done on students panels so literate
people) are all saying the same thing: search engine are the first source of
information when looking on the Internet and all students seem to have receive not
enough training on how to look for information on the Internet.
The best study I found on this topic is one made on all the registered PhD
students (2,218 with an answer rate of 23,4%) last year (2008) on a whole region of
France (not a high technological developed country but far to be the least on a
worldwide scale)23.
As we can imagine PhD students have a high requirements regarding quality
of information.
The study shows that 67,5% of the respondents have never received a training
regarding how to look for information during their whole stay at the university which
could explain the fact that people are running toward search engines directly.
Search engines are used in 96% of the cases when performing research
(which emphasize the necessity of how to well use those technologies).
94% of them do not use blogs which I take as a good thing (even if the survey
is saying the opposite, blogs being written by professionals as well).
The most used search engines are Google (85%) and Google Scholar 37%
(which is a sub search engine of Google).
60% of them do not know what is a meta search engine and only 5% of them
use them.
46 % do not know the search engine of their field and only 20% do use them.
Those figures are very interesting because they show clearly how people are
not adapted to the technology they are using. PhD students should be some of the
most search engines awarded people and it seems that for France they are not. They
are strictly dependent of a single search engine which is here Google. They know
very few of his sub search engine and as written above they do not know how to use
the technology. They are also not aware massively about other search engines.