Lost in Cyberspace: Where to Go? What to Believe?

Electronic search engines like Yahoo! and Ask.com dominate high school students’ information seeking, with Google being the number one information searching option. This paper examines the literature that focuses on students’ searching skills and ways that they are responding to an overload of information. The literature shows that students prefer using the Web over printed text because of the speed of accessing information and the likelihood of locating up-to-date information. Paradoxically, regardless of the level of Internet expertise, students are often not satisfied with search results. This paper therefore explores the techniques that students could be using to retrieve trustworthy and relevant information.