Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

British Public Trust Google More than Partners

posted by janrinok on Saturday April 26 2014, @03:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-I-wouldn't-trust-Google-with-my-partner dept.

lhsi writes:

A study looked at how the British public use Google. Londoners made more searches on average compared to the rest of the country. People were more likely to trust a fact from Google over their family and friends.

More than half of UK adults and 77 per cent of the countries' 18-24 year olds would trust the search engine to answer a question more accurately than their partner.

Ian Harris, founder of Search Laboratory, said: "Google is seen as a kind of oracle, when you type in a question to a search engine you almost always take the first result as gospel so it's not surprising to see that we as a nation trust it more than our friends and family.

And while social media grows with popularity every day, fake rumours about celebrities etc. mean there is the stigma that most things read on Twitter and Facebook should be taken with a pinch of salt."

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
British Public Trust Google More than Partners | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 22 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 1) by Anonymous Cowherd on Saturday April 26 2014, @05:52PM

    by Anonymous Cowherd (3699) on Saturday April 26 2014, @05:52PM (#36666)

    I agree it's a baiting headline but TFA has the same. It conflates the two meanings of trust from two different contexts: with a partner trust implies "not lying", but with Google, trust implies "more likely to be correct than incorrect". The former implies intent whereas the later doesn't. Methinks the whole study is flawed because of this fundamental difference, and I don't trust (ha!) the study.