1.3 Focus, goals and structure of the report

The focus of this work is to put in evidence that there is a critical lack of how to use the Internet either at home that within businesses and that one is influencing the other.

Such lack of knowledge is raising from the over evaluation we are making about technologies, commercial search engine strategies, lack of awareness, strong addiction to search engines, lack of training within businesses and educational institutions.

This has some critical consequences on business decision-making as well as day to day choices.

If those risks are relevant it is then very important to put them in evidence showing concretely what are those risks, where are they coming from and how much is the gap of information between a search from a search engine addicted user and the most rational way of looking for the information.

The structure of the report is as follow:

The first idea is to introduce the concept of data quality. What do we mean by data quality? How to get data quality on the Internet?

The next point is dealing with the world of search engines and the dependency which is coming out from them.

Analyzing the world of search engines is important to understand how the Internet is not as rational as one could think and what are the actors of the dependency (search engines may be not the Internet, search engines may be different from a country to another).

Once this analysis made, a look at the facts and figures regarding search engine users attitudes will be conducted. This should drive us to the conclusion that Internet users are not using an all set of search tools but only a couple of them: the dependency concept.

Once the dependency concept introduced we will measure the risks of such addiction on data quality.

Google being in Europe the most used search engine and it will be used as a concrete example in the last part.

In the last part recommendations will be given for companies interested in improving their information research system and reducing data quality issues when looking for information on the Internet.