As much as 63% of people worldwide trust search engines, including Google, Bing and Yahoo, for news and information more than news outlets themselves, according to a survey conducted by Edelman, a public relations firm based in the United States. It also found that only 53% trust online-only media. Edelman’s report includes the results of a survey of 33,000 people across 28 countries.

The findings indicate that readers trust a headline more when they read it in Google’s news aggregator, as opposed to coming across the same on the original website. In another result not too encouraging for the industry, the survey also found that 78% of people have higher trust in news shared by their family or friends than in those shared by academic experts (65%) or journalists (44%).

One of the reasons behind this could be related to how media groups package news for specific platforms. For example, websites optimise headlines for search engines, whereas those shared on social media other platforms can be more comprehensible. The results can also be attributed to Google's marketing capabilities – it was ranked the second most trusted company in the world, after BMW.