FEATURE
“Organisations such as Sky Bet are of a size that stops them
spending substantial money on anything that doesn’t have
clear accountability”
The Trust Barometer determines if the
public trusts the media and institutions.
Each year there is a shift in focus and in
2016 they looked closely at the influence
of search.
Key fi ndings
Edelman found that 71% of respondents
used search several times a week, whereas
45% of respondents used online/off-line
newspapers several times a week.
But what’s more revealing is the
constantly growing trust in search engines
(see Figure 1).
In 2012 traditional media was seen
as marginally more trustworthy than
search engines, earning a trust score of 62
against search engines’ 61.
In 2016, traditional media has a trust
score of 58 and search engines a trust
score of 63.
Interpreting this data: people don’t trust
publications such as the Daily Mail as
much as they do search engines.
This lack of trust in mainstream media
might explain why Wikipedia now refuses
to cite the Daily Mail as a reference.
What about the future of trust
in search?
If you know about SEO, you know
Google is the overlord when it comes to
machine learning and artificial intelligence.
It has been training and refining these
algorithms for years.
If you want to how Google
interprets what a good site is, read its
Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines 2017
(tinyurl.com/j6pfe5h), which is the manual
Google used for training its team of site
evaluators. These evaluations were then
used as seed/training data for Google’s
artificial intelligence algorithms.
In my view, search has entered a
new age where c