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In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

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Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#21

Post by moate »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #5
ketzo wrote: post #4

This seems like... a really big deal? I know that we're all sort of living in a world where "put ads on your high-traffic site" is a deeply outdated revenue model, but it's still quite a popular one, depending on what corner of the internet you're in.

I think that model is as relevant as ever. Google is just narrowing the list of “high-traffic” sites worth putting your ads on, to exclusively Google properties.

If I put an ad on there, but nobody clicks it, how is that still relevant?

Anecdata, but the rate at which I google something that I basically want to search on Wikipedia but then don't click through to Wikipedia has got to be about 50%. WP doesn't monetize their site, so maybe not the best example?

I guess this could also be indicative of how people use Google (the search engine proper) now. You need some sort of data(phone number, address, trivia fact), and Alphabet has already scraped the relevant site to pipe in that data.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#24

Post by searchableguy »

Google provides instant answers for most medical queries, calculations, celebrities, sports, news, weather, how-tos, definitions, reviews, map, shopping, images, etc. Most people don't search outside of queries that google can answer from their own sources frequently so this seems plausible.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#25

Post by thomascgalvin »

If Google ever started including copy-pasteable code from Stack Overflow, I might never follow a link from Google again.

Which I think says a lot about how Google is used now. I don't use Google to find web pages, I use it to find an answer to a pressing question. When I'm looking for something to read, I go to a content aggregator like HN or Reddit.

Of course this isn't sustainable. If Google is just presenting other sites' data "for" them, and thus depriving them of traffic and revenue, eventually there won't be any incentive to create the content Google is scraping. Long term, this seems self-defeating for Google, just as its ruinous to the sites they scrape.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#28

Post by echelon »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic…

My guess is that you're part of an unprofitable long tail. Why optimize for your use case when they can capture customers that bring more money with far less effort?

I wager that most people don't perceive a decline in search results quality. At least not to an extent where they'd notice and switch to using Bing.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#30

Post by karlshea »

airhead969 wrote: post #11

Don't ogle Google, https://duckduckgo.com instead.

I use DDG as my default engine on my phone, and about 50% of the time I have to re-search on Google with g! because I'm not finding what I'm looking for.

That's not to say the results on Google aren't getting worse, because they are, but DDG still has a long way to go.

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