People tend to choose search terms that will confirm their beliefs

Ars Technica: “Forcing the use of general search terms can help people change their minds. People are often quite selective about the information they’ll accept, seeking out sources that will confirm their biases, while discounting those that will challenge their beliefs. In theory, search engines can potentially change that. By prioritizing results from high-quality, credible sources, a search engine could ensure that people found accurate information more frequently, potentially opening them to the possibility of updating their beliefs. Obviously, that hasn’t worked out on the technology side, as people quickly learned how to game the algorithms used by search engines, meaning that the webpages that get returned have been created by people with no interest in quality or credibility. But a new study is suggesting that the concept fails on the human side, too, as people tend to devise search terms that are specific enough to ensure that the results of the search will end up reinforcing their existing beliefs. The study showed that invisibly swapping search terms to something more general can go a long way toward enabling people to change their mind. Searching for affirmation. The new work was done by two researchers at Tulane, Eugina Leung and Oleg Urminsky. Much of their study focuses on a simple question that people might turn to a search engine to answer: is caffeine good or bad for you? If you wanted to search for that, you could potentially ask “what are the health effects of caffeine?” which should get you a mixture of the pros and cons. But people could also ask it in less neutral terms, such as, “is caffeine bad for you?” These more specific searches are likely to pull up a more biased selection of results than the general, neutral terms.”