It is universally acknowledged that the British people rely heavily on Goggle’s search engine, trusting the answers it generates to their entirety.
It is just so easy to Google a complicated question that arrives at the workplace, the name of that actress or even the temperature to cook at chicken at, with Google presenting itself as a fountain of knowledge that we all want a piece of.
Where traditionally we took to dictionaries and thesauruses to solve our queries of language and grammar we now simply ask our lifetime companion that is the search engine.
A survey has been directed by Search Laboratory, a firm that wanted to gain more of an understanding of our relationship with Google.
They found that women were more likely to trust Google than men, discovering that although men do Google questions they have on their mind, females are more desperate to gain answers immediately.
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.
Many would assume that social media would be the logical platform to post questions, speaking amongst friends and followers whom we have a personal connection with.
However, it seems over the past few years we have seen social media as a platform synonymous with gossip culture, thriving off of inaccuracy and not serving to our inquisitorial minds.
“ 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.’ says Harris.
“The search engine has pretty much killed the pub debate as any argument is almost always ended by the phrase ‘I’ve Googled it…’ whereas 10, 15 years ago you might have heard ‘I’ve asked my mate…’ and I think it’ll be a long time since we start saying ‘I’ve Twittered it.’”
London and the north west were named as two areas where the search engine was trusted more than anywhere else in the country, with a constant reliance displayed.
The Search Laboratory found that 61% of people in this region have more faith in the answers that Google can generate than those provided by their partners, illustrating just how much we depend on the technology giants.
The south east proved to have the least faith in their partner’s academic ability with less than 25% choosing the answers given to them by their other half over their computer.
We at SEO News understand why these statistics have been arrived at, knowing just how hard Google work to programme the answers to common questions as well as giving ranking power to reliable and informative pages.
Share your thoughts on this subject with us; do you trust Google more than your family and friends?
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