People trust search engines says PR company

ACCORDING TO THE LATEST Trust survey from Edelman, people trust search engines as their primary sources of information.

This trust in software controlled by dominant software houses and personal data hungry server farms comes at the expense of other information outlets such as online news sites, *cough*, and print newspapers.

House of spin Edelman presented its findings with the sort of PR voodoo that we have come to know, love and translate for years.

Introducing the Trust report Richard Edelman, president and CEO at Edelman, created a beguiling word jumble that no doubt would have won an appreciative tick on an interactive whiteboard in some feng shui'd thinkspace.

"Skepticism has increased as a result of the systemic impact of corporate and government crises, causing a transformation in the framework of trust," he said. "Trust in business may have stabilized globally, but it is different and conditional, premised on what a company does and how it communicates."

We ran this through a translation service and then through a Yorkshire man, and were informed that government, business and banker scammery has lead the man on the street to treat their claims with suspicion. However, the same cannot be said for search engines, which Edelman said are ranked as the number one place for people to find information on a company.

"People are behaving like smart consumers when it comes to news and information, turning first to search engines to see what is available on the topic they are interested in, and then seeking out traditional media to confirm or expand on what they learn," said Neal Flieger, who is chair of Edelman's research firm, Strategyone, which conducted the research.

"Information ubiquity has changed the playbook for corporate communications. A company with a message can't simply be present, but rather omnipresent," he added, perhaps realising that he still had some long words to use up.

Incredibly the technology business was the most trusted industry of all, which suggests that the majority of people do not spend much time reading technology news articles. The finance industry was the least trusted, and it was followed in second place by equally despised bankers. µ