14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, being the biggest thing on the Internet besides pornography brings about an aura of distrust similar to the one every government has around it. Google, because the Mountain View based company is what I'm talking about, of course, came to find this out firsthand, according to a study carried on Internet users by the University of Southern California's Center for the Digital Future.
The number of people that still trust that the information provided by search engines has dropped to an all-time low of 51 percent, a drop of 10 points since the last time the same question was asked and results were polled in. Google, in particular, is seeing this as being even grimmer, with only 49 percent of the people thinking that the results returned by the Great Search Engine are the best to be found.
That is an interesting figure, taking into account the fact that only 46 percent of the Internet users consider the information available through the use of such search engines is reliable. In the meantime, 43 percent of the non-Internet users have said the same thing.
However, some light might be shining through the clouds for Google, if not in user reliability, in traffic recorded: a continuing growing number of Internet users choose to have a search engine as their homepage with 21 percent responding that to be their case. That is a little over double than the number of Internet users admitting to it in 2005. The Gmail initiative is also looking like a certain winner because most of the users (47 percent) go directly to check their email when first opening their browsers.
Now, it comes down to Google's internal policy to capitalize on the figures made available by the study or to work on their filters and indexing to trim out the numbers of results that don't turn out to be so relevant, as users have complained. A digg system could maybe prove to be the winner?