This week the public relations firm Edelman released a report showing that online search is now a more trusted source of news and information than traditional news media. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, this effect was even more pronounced among millenials.
At this point, you are probably a little confused. Google isn't a news outlet. It does not generate content or track down leads. How can Google be a more trusted news source than an actual news site? What's going on here?
Well, here is how I have been thinking about this. As more news media moves online, users are more comfortable consuming their news and information entirely from the internet, but as with most things on the internet, we want choice! (After all, have you ever searched for a relatively specific search term, but still felt annoyed or let down when the search engine only returns one or two relevant hits?) Users are no longer limited to the magazines to which they can afford to subscribe or to their local news stations. More sources, more details, and more viewpoints are becoming better. As Quartz explains: "Getting an at-a-glance look at a wide range of stories deemed relevant by a search-engine algorithm—be they from traditional news outlets, blogs, advertisements, and much else besides—is more comforting to the curious reader, it seems, than simply pulling up a single news outlet’s site." And given the inherent biases of so many news outlets these days, perhaps this approach is actually more balanced overall... but that is a discussion for another blog.
So what does this mean for digital marketing and for search engines? Well, on the one hand, this trust gives search a level of credibility and power with consumers, making paid search and search engine optimization even more valuable as marketing tools. Users clearly trust the algorithms to effectively curate their worldview, so imagine how much more likely they are to select an ad or a site that was picked for them and presented as highly and specifically relevant. On the other hand, this revelation should serve as a warning to companies like Google not to overdo it or to lose sight of their core competency. If advertising is not judiciously vetted and well matched to users or if search results become too easily manipulated by crack marketing teams, search engines could lose that valuable trust as quickly as they earned it.
Consumers trust Google's news algorithm more than traditional media organizations
Google is now a more trusted source of news than the websites it aggregates
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