Ask not what Digg can do for you…

…The truth is that if you’re a political conservative online, Digg isn’t going to do anything to help you. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. News articles and blog posts that become popular on Digg, the largest social driven site on the web, also tend to hit the front page of Google, the most popular search engine on the web.

Scott Cleland of Precursor, shared with me that studies have been done which indicate that students have an increasing tendency to believe that what comes up in a Google search is the truth (a couple of good studies are Maryam Moayeri: Lost in Cyberspace: Where to Go? What to Believe? and Educause: Google Jockeying).

To illustrate my point, I ran four random searches last night off two “Top Ten” lists on Digg. I’ve shown below the stories, then the searches I ran, which have the search words highlighted. Every time I do one of these experiments, I actually hope it won’t work, because that would mean that Digg’s influence on public information was waning, but the results of these spot-checks were quite predictable.

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First, from the “Top Ten in All Topics” section on the Front Page of Digg, a couple of examples, which I’ve circled in red:

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For the first one, Retarded Gas Schemes People are Actually Trying, I ran a google search, Gas Saving Schemes (Note: I did not use quotation marks on any of these searches, and the search results are as of Monday evening and may have changed somewhat since then.), and as you can see, the original article, and various social networking posts are the top seven search results on Google, with the original post being #1, and the Digg post being #2.

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For the next one, Consumerism in Hong Kong (Pic), the search results using the key words Consumerism Hong Kong were very similar:

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So, let’s move on and choose a couple from the political section (under “World & Business) of Digg:

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For Strip Search of 13-Year-Old Ruled Unconstitutional, using the keywords strip search advil, the results were, again, very similar:

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And finally, on McCain Forgets that Czechoslvakia Isn’t a Country…Again, using the keywords McCain Czechoslvakia, the results varied in that the search results weren’t the first ones, but they were still on the front page:

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So, I’m sure you get the point. The higher you rank on Digg, the higher you’re likely to rank in the search engine results, and the more likely the information in the post is to be perceived as “accurate.” So Digg is important. Next week, we’ll talk about how Digg works, and what you we can do while we’re there.

Also see:

• e-doublespeak? i-resist!
• Why Page Rank is Important
• Search Engines: Your Search is Only as Good as your Keywords