According to the latest research, about 60 percent of Russians turn to information websites for news and 48 percent admitted that they trust news they learn from the web.
The poll was conducted in January by the independent sociological service Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) among those who had internet access.
When researchers asked internet users if they trusted the reports they got from the web, 48 percent said that they found online news sources credible. Seventeen percent said they did not trust them and 20 percent of internet users said they were not using the web to get the news. Five percent of respondents said they found it difficult to give an exact answer.
Of those who read news on the internet, 67 percent said they preferred to scan news aggregators as the first page for news search. Only 17 percent said they turned directly to dedicated news sites. Russia's own search engine Yandex was more popular than Google among news readers, 55 percent versus 27 percent.
When asked which source of information they would trust more in case of conflicting reports, the results were almost even: 32 percent said they found television more credible and 30 percent said the same about news websites.
Some 64 percent of Russian internet users said that they were using the web for communication, 44 percent named education as the main reason they went online and 42 percent said they needed it for work.
Russia currently has over 87 million internet users, the most of any European country. However, the share of people with internet access in Russia is just 61 percent which is relatively low by European standards.