A Yale study published in 2015 found that people who searched the internet for an explanation came away feeling smarter afterward, and the effect held even when the search failed to produce an actual answer. It’s worth treating instead as a description of a product working exactly as designed, doing precisely the job it was built to do. Afterward, everyone rated how well they thought they could explain unrelated topics, ones the search had nothing to do with. As Fisher put it, “people who search for information tend to conflate accessible knowledge with their own personal knowledge.” A rising sense of certainty after a quick search is not, on its own, evidence that the certainty is earned.