“The increasing sophistication in representing world knowledge online also implies that asking the right questions will become more of a skill. A common error made among beginning searchers is to pose queries that have a built-in bias, a kind of leading question. A question that “leads the witness” wouldn’t be allowed in a courtroom and shouldn’t be in your research queries either. This is fairly common among K–12 students who don’t yet understand the basics of web search and often frame their questions with built-in assumptions. In cases like this, you need to know that the results are ordered by rank depending on the terms in the query.

Take the following query:
[is the average length of an octopus 25 inches?]
It will give web links in the search results page that look right, but there’s an assumption within the query—that is, that octopuses actually are, on average, 25 inches in length. The web search results will be a bit misleading because there are so many positive hits that mention the terms “octopus” and “25 inches” on the same page. In this case, the search engine doesn’t really understand the question, but gives pages that best match the query, with its biases built in.”