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How Google is Killing Organic Search
21–30 of 220 posts
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#22The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients).
Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you to Geico or a bunch of lead-gen sites, and no matter what, you will end up at an insurance company that makes the biggest margins.
If you really want the cheapest car insurance, you need to find a company that doesn't advertise, and is non-profit, that way your premium is spent buying insurance, not TV ads and Berkshire Hathaway's stock appreciation.
Whenever I see a SERP full of ads, I search for something different. When there is nothing but ads, Google is sending you to high-margin crap.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#23Nit: this article is really criticizing a UI change which makes local results more prominent (in that they take over the entire page). The local results at the top of the page when you search for "Italian restaurants" are all still organic. In fact, whenever there's a map on the right-and side of the page, it's displacing ads. Now, you can be against Google ever making a UI change, or even against Google showing diff…
You may have missed this part of the article:
The scariest part of this is that, if you sell something using the internet, regardless of whether or not you see yourself as a “local" business - or think you’re competing with Google - Google sees you as competition. Searching for “Camera" or “Buy a Dress Shirt" gets you a nearly identical split of screen real estate as that of “local" searches.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#24There's the other problem of decreasing contrast and lack of borders separating the last ad and first organic search result. http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional... A few years ago this was the style http://www.ismoip.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Screen... Before that http://cdn.userstyles.org/style_screenshot_thumbnails/58617_... Now http://i.im…
Note that the FTC agrees with you and recently made an announcement[1] regarding the shading of the ad result box, among other requirements for search engines.
The study the FTC cites[2] indicates that fully half of individuals didn't even realize the page contained ads.
[1] http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/06/searchengine.shtm
[2] http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
In light of "designy" things like this, and other "ideological" things that have transpired in the past few weeks, I've been forcing myself to use DuckDuckGo. It's been about a month now, and I find the results terrible . I want to love it, but the first 10 results are pretty much never what I want. Sadly, Google still performs better on this front for me. If anyone has tips to make it better, I'd be very happy to he…
I believe it might be because DDG is not Google. What works on google might not work the same in DDG. How long have you been using google? Probably long time. During this time you (unconsiously) learned how to ask questions "google way", now you need to learn to quack :p I also found that DDG sometimes (not very often) does not find what I am looking for. Mostly it is because I know nothing of the subject ie. using a…
>How long have you been using google? Probably long time. During this time you (unconsiously) learned how to ask questions "google way", now you need to learn to quack :p
I understand this, but most of us are looking for an alternative to Google and not a completely different search engine.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#26Do results from https://startpage.com work for people in the US? I've been using it for a couple of weeks now (I'm in the EU) and it seems like it works very well (it claims to get its results from Google, but without affecting privacy). It shows some display ads, the percentage of screen real estate used is much smaller than for Google itself.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#27The first result for mobile is organic as far as I can tell (it just happens to be a google property when looking for Italian Restaurants in Tribeca). Try switching the query for mexican restaurant and just a few blocks to the west in SoHo (hi Aaron) a menupages result is first. Also, on the mobile front, I believe the quick results are from places and not Zagat, since with the same mexican restaurants query there are a number of places with just ratings and not "Zagat" ratings (you can see this in the blog's screenshot for Olive Garden as well).
I actually don't mind this on mobile (but I also generally use something else for finding restaurants) since the majority of restaurant websites are basically impossible to navigate on mobile and all I really need to know is 1) where are they 2) what's their phone number. How organic that database is, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem to be showing specifically paid placements.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#28It gets even worse, on some searches I have to scroll a full page down, just to see a result not pushed by a google asset (ads/map/etc). In essence it takes up about 90% of screen space on a large desktop.
Example: http://imgur.com/AJtOPkf (this is zoomed down to 65% to capture all of it....)
They need to remember that there are alternatives just a click away, and serving too many ads degrades the entire internet.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#29The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients). Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you…
there is no such things as "internet searches". Because all search engines behave differently and nobody can tell for sure how panda works , except people working on panda. So the rules are decides by whoever develops the search engine.
Like there is no such thing as SEO , Google has a monopoly and the rule is pay to play.
Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search
#30The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients). Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you…
I think your hypothesis is quite far off. Can you give an example of an auto insurance company that is a non-profit? I couldn't find any. Perhaps you mean a mutual insurance company? Furthermore, when I bought car insurance last month, Geico gave me the most coverage for the least amount of money (after quite a bit of research), so I also don't agree with your assertation that Google is no help in that regard.
While I agree with the concept, as I work for a non-profit and belong to a credit union instead of a bank, I don't think your hypothesis holds without some data to back it up.