Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

#51

Post by archangel_one » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 2:32 AM UTC

Regardless of whether they're correct about it lowering traffic or not, I strongly dislike the use of the word "steal" here. To me that signifies a strange sense of entitlement; the search results are not "yours" and you don't have a God-given right to them, so Google cannot steal them from you. You might as well claim that "I'm Feeling Lucky" steals your search results because users never see any mention of your site if you're in second place, or that showing 10 results per page is unfair to those in 11th place.

I wonder a little if this reflects a general debasement of the word "steal". Some years ago it clearly referred to taking physical property, but maybe the smear campaigns from the music / movie industry have successfully extended the scope of the word to include things like this.

Re: Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

#52

Post by statictype » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 6:46 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #35

moultano wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the cynicism. Do you have any evidence for this whatsoever?

He's absolutely, screamingly right. They're an advertising company. Big bang changes to the website exist to sell more advertising. Everything else they do is window dressing to make people forget that they are an advertising company.

Everything else they do is window dressing to make people forget that they are an advertising company

That's a bit disingenuous. In the same way, newspapers are also advertising companies. The journalism they do is 'window dressing'.

Re: Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

#53

Post by statictype » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 6:54 AM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #12

henrikschroder wrote: post #3

There's been quite a lot of UX research on this, and the concept of "the fold" simply doesn't exist for webpages. People scroll and scan, even the least knowledgeable ones.

Not when they're in the process of typing.

When most people are in the process of typing, let's face it, they're looking at the keyboard and hardly at the screen at all, let alone, scrolling down.

Re: Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

#54

Post by rmc » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 2:39 PM UTC

You're assuming that each place on the first page gets equal amounts of traffic. The 4th result does not get the same amount of traffic as the 1st result, it gets much much less.

Re: Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

#55

Post by ajkohn » Fri, Oct 01, 2010, 6:00 PM UTC

ajkohn wrote: post #33

randfish wrote: post #26

There are two blog posts with real data from tens of thousands of search queries showing that in reality, the impact of Google Instant has been negligible: - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-instant-fewer-changes-to-s... - http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/impact-of-google-instant... I wish this type of sensationalist supposition without data to back up the assumptions received less attention here at HN. I've alwa…

Well, the impact on search query length may be negligible but there are other ways in which Instant may be changing search behavior. I have a small slice of data I hope to post in the very near future.

Here's some preliminary data that shows that Google Instant may have changed the distribution of clicks by rank, with more emphasis being put on results above the fold.

http://bit.ly/dAzvX3

It's not about the query behavior, but about assessment behavior. As such, your mileage may vary based on your particular rank for terms.

Outside of this analysis, the keyword length could remain the same, but a site may receive less traffic if the auto complete algorithm has changed for critical terms. Again, this will vary site by site - and where one loses, another will gain.