Here’s some research from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University that again shows the level of trust we place on the opinions of social media contacts – people we may in many cases have never met in real life. (via Poynter.org)

What’s the most believable source on Twitter?

A retweet from someone you trust (4.08/5) followed by a tweet from someone with ‘verified author expertise’ in the subject (4.04/5).  In addition to showing the power of peer recommendations, that also demonstrates how false information can spread quickly online.

Interestingly, the list of top ten trust factors includes the Twitter verification mark.  Getting that blue tick does seem to raise the credibility of your Twitter account.

At the same time, tweets from twitter followers inspire the least credibility concerns, with ones found via search having the highest.

Meanwhile a study published in searchengineland (via Simply Zesty) says that 72% trust online reviews as much as they do recommendations from friends.

In all, 58% say positive customer reviews would make them trust a business more, 25% say they have no impact and 17% pay no attention to them.

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Here’s a reason to pay more attention to your search engine rankings – the top three spots on Google get 58% of clicks.  

Optify (via Searchengine watch) carried out a study, which showed that websites at the top of Google get an average of 36.4% of clicks, those in second place 12.5% and those in third 9.5%.

That chimes in with an earlier Chitika study, showing that the no 1 spot on Google gets 34.35% of traffic.   Optify also says that being any further back than page two has no real business value for you at all.

Not surprisingly, as I work for a social media agency, I am a big believer in SEO + social working together.    For example, Comscore has shown that 50% of ‘social media exposed’ surfers search for product terms every day compared to 33% of non-exposed surfers.    In other words, SEO can help improve your rankings but social media can prompt them to try and find out more in the first place.

Then of course, the search engine giants themselves are constantly looking for ways to embrace so-called ‘social search.’

The San Francisco Chronicle has a good summary of how search engines are tapping into social.  As (MIcrosoft) Bing’s Paul Yiu says in the piece, “search up until recently has been a lonely experience.    We want to introduce people as an important part of search.”

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The end of search is a theme that’s been talked about a lot in the past – as long ago as in Feb 2008, Ben Kunz of Media Associates produced a series of graphs from Google Trends showing that search volumes were significantly down for a range of what you might call staple terms – music, furniture, office supplies etc.

Some of it is wishful thinking as many of us wish for the age of Google to start drawing to a close (whether the age of Facebook is any better is of course a different matter altogether).

And the latest Nielsen search stats from the US show that Google is as dominant as ever, controlling almost 2/3 (64.2%) of the search market – a share that’s hardly changed since last year, despite all the new bells and whistles that Microsoft’s Bing (on 13.6%) has been rolling out.

It’s the second table from the Nielsen post however that makes for more interesting reading. Over the past year, search activity is down 16% – 17% in the case of Google. Yahoo! (-30%) performed particularly badly, though despite it’s still small share Bing (+28%) has done well. So all those extra features are paying off after all.

OK, so with almost nine million searches being conducted in the US in July, search is certainly not dead. But a drop of close to a fifth year on year is still significant, and one explanation has to be that people get more and more of what they need and want via social media. There is that research from earlier in the year after all about Facebook now driving more traffic to major news and entertainment portals than Google.

At the very least it reinforces what Comscore found last year – that search and social media campaigns now need to work very much in tandem, with a paid search campaign supported by social activity being 2.23x more effective than if conducted on its own.

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This is a short post for the forthcoming Cow Digital digest, which Louise Doherty and myself put together every week.  Sign up for it here!

According to Google, the fastest growing search terms for 2009 so far have been Michael Jackson, Facebook and Tuenti, the latter being a leading Spanish social network.   Meanwhile the top three searches for Microsoft’s search engine ‘Bing’, are likewise Michael Jackson and Facebook, with Swine Flu in third place.

Perhaps of more interest is Google’s list of fast falling searches.  Barack Obama, Amy Winehouse and Heath Ledger all figure.  

So, perhaps worryingly for the brands in question do video sharing site Daily Motion, social network Bebo and Nintendo’s game console, the wii.

Search engines make you smarter, so say researchers from Penn State University (via Science Daily).    Well…kind of.   But they don’t make you stupid as Nicholas Carr claimed in his seminal Atlantic Magazine article last year.

Researchers looked at search habits of 72 participants engaging in 426 tasks.   Rather than search being used to find out new stuff, search engines were “primarily used for fact checking users’ own internal knowledge.”   According to the academics, that means that search is actually part of our own internal learning process.

Hence the fears about students for example getting lazy and just using Google rather than their brains to find out answers might be incorrect.  Instead, Google, Bing et al support “higher level information needs”, i.e to increase the chances that we get the right answer and to put detail on things we already know.

That makes sense if you look at how search habits are evolving, in particular lengthening.   Last week Hitwise’s Asia-Pacific analyst Alan Long put out a post on lengthening search terms.   Something that Hitwise says is an international trend – one and two word searches have gone down over the past three years and 3+ word searches have gone up.

People already have a fair idea of what they are after when they go to search, hence more specific searches.  As a result, search is as much to validate and build on existing knowledge as to find new one.

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Metrics company Comscore has come out with a study on global Internet use by hours spent surfing. Surprisingly, Microsoft’s range of websites – in particular Windows Live Messenger – leads, with 15% of time spent online globally.

However at the same time as Australian website Digital Media points out, YouTube and Facebook, arguably the two highest profile players in the social media category, took up almost 10% of the 27 billion global Internet hours people in Sept 09.

Looking at Facebook, its share of hours grew by 193%. It also over-indexes significantly in both Europe (6.6% share vs 5.1% globally), and the Middle East / Africa (where it has 8%).

It’s worth noting that Comscore’s data excluded time spent surfing from a mobile device. If that had been factored in, then Facebook’s share would almost certainly have been higher. According to Facebook’s Director of Mobile, Henri Moissinac, the network now has 65 million mobile users – or 25% of its total reach.

Recently, stats showed that Facebook had reached almost 100 million users in Europe. Though the UK is by far the leading territory with 20+ million plus users, the network showed particularly strong growth in Italy, Germany and Turkey.

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