The Science of Google Rank. Ignore at your own risk

Thought Leadership Times Blog (Feb 3 2010)

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   Every new technology since the beginning of mankind dissolves throughout globe with a life of its own changing production, developing new behaviors, creating scores of new problems as well as providing many solutions to old problems.

   Each development layering on top of the last leading us into new directions. The internet, a rather recent layer to the pile, has evolved and matured to a point where any business that is not a visible piece of its communicative force will left in the dark. Most businesses have enough wisdom to have realized that they need to be a part of this network, but the next task is to determine how to going about doing so.

   A vast majority of people don’t trust what they do not understand or are unfamiliar with. The more information available to them, the better they feel about the subject. This feeling of comfort by familiarity and trust has been true far before the internet and will continue to be a life and death variable for any business, a variable worth spending money on. The realization at this juncture is that media isn’t generally trusted as we have grown up in an environment where much of what we see is created to persuade and fool for the gain of another or in a more innocent nature, simply a lack in expertise to produce valuable information.

   It is apparent however that people broadly trust Google’s ability to tell them what source to trust. A 2007 eye tracking study, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, noted that when participants “selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant.”

   I cannot not speak to whether this is our nature to be too lazy to conduct a more intensive search or that Google’s rankings do provide a quick bridge to a solid source, but the enduring lesson is crystal clear:  The higher the Google ranking, the louder and more trusted the voice.

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