If a website comes up first on google do you trust the source?

Not necessarily. If it is expert information, I pick the site that would be most likely to have it—NIH or some universities for medical issues, IMDB for movies, etc, but I usually try several sources.

As you may know, how far up a Google list a site comes is determined by Google ad words, which are words a company buys that are most likely to be searched on. So a site that comes up first is there because that particular day its paid-for ad words were most searched, and so it may or may not be any more trustworthy than one farther down on the list.

No because that’s based on advertising investment. Anyone can place themselves at the top of a google search. Some terms might cost you 100 bucks a click. I generally look at the third through 20th and see what’s relevant. I rarely look at the top 3 though.

By first result, do you mean including the sponsored ones? Because I always, always ignore those. I’ll usually use one of the first 3 results, but maybe as a starting place. It kinda depends on what I’m searching – I’m a lot more discriminating if I’m looking for info on, say, a politician than a restaurant recommendation. I usually check with at least 2 different websites to make sure the first one was reliable, and I’d only use credible sources for paper (unless it was including an opinion or something).

Thank you everyone.
I agree.

I usually ignore the hits that are sponsored.

If a sponsored link is the source that I was looking for anyway, I will usually hit their sponsored link rather than the freely searched link for the same site that may be 4 or 5 below just to make them feel those expensive Google AdWords were worth it.