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Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

sparktoro.com

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Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

#121
post #47

This will likely backfire in the long term. People writing content will shy away from writing articles on subjects or which answer questions that google will simply steal and display. Eventually the existing sources will become out of date and google will begin to serve inaccurate information.

What type of articles would that be? Looking at how complete Wikipedia is, it seems peoples will to write content for free is kind of unlimited.

Look at HN. Your opinion is free text number 20688220 written here. Ready for Google to eat. Twenty million texts written. Without any payment at all.

Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

#122
My main takeaway from this was where the hell are they getting that data? A little digging… apparently if you install Avast antivirus they're tracking all of this and selling /providing to Jumpshot - wow.

> Baker said Jumpshot’s data comes from 100 million devices worldwide, whose users have downloaded free security software from partner Avast. The devices include smartphones, laptops and tablets.

https://marketingland.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-...

Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

#123
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your stand, but what Google did with its featured snippets is essentially a form of bait and switch. It encouraged entrepreneurs and creators to create content that could answer specific queries with the promise that Google will drive traffic to their sites. Now Google is using the same content and depriving them of the traffic. That's pretty scummy in my opinion.

Hm, I think there's scumminess on both sides, since (as GP noted) even simple sites (e.g. for lyrics) are bloated and unusable. Before: User: Hey Google, what's the monthly payment on a 20-year mortgage with 3.9% APR? Google: Oh, MortgateSite would know, go there. MortgageSite: Here's your calculator. User: Okay, let me put in the numbers ... awesome, thanks! Oh, neat, they can hook me up with lenders. Let me take a…

You forgot:

MortgageSite: Please wait while we take 10 seconds to calculate an interest rate AND CHECK OUT THIS SPONSOR!

MortgageSite: Five more seconds. YOUR COMPUTER MIGHT HAVE A VIRUS!! DOWNLOAD THIS FREE SCANNER NOW!

MortgageSite: Your rate has been calculated! Click HERE to reveal it using a totally pointless JavaScript animation!

User: Finally, now I’ll just move my cursor up and close this tab.

MortgageSite: OMFG YOURE GOING AWAY! Please come back and click on me more!!!

Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

#125
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now Google is using the same content and depriving them of the traffic. I found some instructions[1] that says a website can opt out of Google's Featured Snippets with special HTML code: Are there any cases of websites deliberately opting out of snippets and therefore seeing their referral links (and ad revenue) increase? [1] https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/27/google-featured-sni...

It's hard for me to shake the vague feeling that this feels like someone setting up on the sidewalk in front of your property and saying hey, you could have done X, Y, or Z, to stop me from being here. And you say, I did do X. And they say, oh, X was two years ago. Y was last year. Now you have to do Z. Until next year when it'll be AA. And weirdly, AA is the exact opposite of X, because what you thought would take c…

Do I get to bill google for all extra traffic I have to send by appending that to the body of my websites in order to prevent them from stealing my intellectual property?

Also going forward you have to add this to your site or I will steal anything that isn't nailed down.

Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

#126
post #15

So a common trope in the startup world is the difference between a feature and a company, the idea being that lots of features are masquerading as companies. This inevitably leads to them being shocked--SHOCKED--when some bigger player adds that feature, eating their lunch. I feel the same way about a lot of outbound sites on Google. There are a bunch of things I just don't want to go to another site for. Off the top…

> Exchange rates

I set up custom search keywords in every browser I use for this, among many other custom searches. In that particular case I query xe.com from an address bar search (not affiliated with them I've just always used the site) as xe for my most common currency conversion and others like xeyen for Japanese rates, xegbp for British Pound, etc. Takes me right to the page.

Even for various Google services I set them up to save unnecessary clicks.

Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

#127
To be fair a lot of the time I can get the info I need directly from the search.

- I use Google as a calculator and a unit of measure converter including currency

- I don't hesitate to "define WORD" when I don't know a word which gets displayed at the top

- What is the capital/population/square miles of

- Who is/cast of/CHARACTERNAME actor

- What muscles are used with movement/machine

- synonym/antonym WORD

- SONG lyrics/"turn off your mind relax and float down stream" song/'Tomorrow Never Knows' band

Actually, every single time I open a Google tab I query "define define" first so that I have the search bar at the top and not in the center of the page. Don't judge me, you do weird stuff too.

Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did that site get the sports schedule? Did they just copy it from somewhere else?

And that's part of the question: If Google's getting all it's data from first party sources, say, scraping it from the team's website, it may not have harmed anyone there. But if it's scraping it from a site which aggregated and normalized the information into an easily parse-able format (hence, providing value, of which Google took advantage), then they must be compensated for it.

If it's getting it from a site that's adding no value (e.g. just copying and pasting another site), then there's probably nobody to compensate either.

Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

#129
post #15

So a common trope in the startup world is the difference between a feature and a company, the idea being that lots of features are masquerading as companies. This inevitably leads to them being shocked--SHOCKED--when some bigger player adds that feature, eating their lunch. I feel the same way about a lot of outbound sites on Google. There are a bunch of things I just don't want to go to another site for. Off the top…

I understand your stand, but what Google did with its featured snippets is essentially a form of bait and switch. It encouraged entrepreneurs and creators to create content that could answer specific queries with the promise that Google will drive traffic to their sites. Now Google is using the same content and depriving them of the traffic. That's pretty scummy in my opinion.

A bait and switch would imply more of an implicit contract than there ever was along the way.

In the 90s, people were making websites because they wanted to make websites, and some of them were informational, and some of them were just whatever cool thing somebody decided to publish. Keeping track of your favorite sites was harder, but eventually browsers added bookmarks and it became a bit easier.

Okay, now how do you find all of that stuff? Three answers kind of sprung up: sites that are list of sites, directories (Yahoo) and search engines. They kind of work, but finding good stuff is still hard, and while the best answer here is probably search, the indexes aren’t entirely comprehensive and the algorithms aren’t good at sorting good stuff from bad stuff yet, they’re too easily gamed.

Google came along and went with search, but they did two things differently: they built a comprehensive index and they had a good algorithm for sorting good stuff from bad stuff. This didn’t stop an entire industry from springing up to try and game it, but they made gaming their algorithm an increasingly expensive proposition, and just doing the right thing easier.

So now we have a good search engine with a comprehensive index, now the web has a different problem: as much stuff as there is, it turns out there’s not enough stuff about a lot of stuff, and this is obvious once you have a good enough search engine that will till you whether there is enough stuff about your term. Well as it turns out, it is already 2004 and people are just now figuring out how to make lots and lots of money with this internet and web stuff. Google has come out ahead of the pact as the obviously superior choice for searching all this stuff, their competitors get a lot better, but Google stays ahead of them, and they’re able to maintain a lead by simply being so much better there is no reason to stop using Google so long as they’re not evil.

They also figured something else out: people are looking for information, or the tools for getting that information. Who knows more about getting information than peoples whose jobs it is to find and surface the right information? And it turns out that some things you can’t find with just a webpage, you need other kinds of tools, like calculators. So they built them in, because at the end of the day, it’s the information that people actually want, they don’t need the debris that comes along with loading a full webpage.

tl;dr Google is an information services company and always has been. Characterizing them as a search engine or advertising company is a massive understatement and was always inaccurate.

Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

#130
post #119

For those who skipped the article, this data is exclusively from users who installed Avast "security" products, which apparently are sufficiently invasive that they get this sort of data and sell it to third parties. The article thinks this dataset is close enough to representative to present their conclusions as more or less facts. I'm not sure I'd make the same conclusion.

I don’t trust the avast data. According to Microsoft bing has 9% market share. While avast data shows it as 1.4%. https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/8982080475...
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