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This study assesses the awareness and perceived utility of two features Google Search introduced in February 2021: “About this result” and “More about this page”. Google stated that the goal of these features is to help users vet unfamiliar web domains (or sources). We investigated whether the features were sufficiently prominent to be detected by frequent users of Google Search, and their perceived utility for making credibility judgments of sources, in one-on-one user studies with 25 undergraduate college students, who identify as frequent users of Google Search. Our results indicate a lack of adoption or awareness of these features by our participants and neutral-positive perceptions of their utility in evaluating web sources. We also examined the perceived usefulness of nine other domain credibility signals collected from the W3C.
Wang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.