Google benefits by crawling the content everyone else creates and by being the aggregator for consumers. So it’s unfair to use other people’s content for rich snippets and not reciprocate by referring traffic.
Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
201–210 of 531 posts
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true, but a collection of facts ("a database") falls under copyright.
https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html#data This doesn't provide any protection for the underlying facts.
No, but if Google imports a database then they are still affected by the compilation copyright. It's too obvious of a hack to "just" claim that "yeah, we imported that entire database, but then we cracked all the facts apart and they're all separate now and it's just as if we never imported the database". That's not how the law works.
Even more interestingly, we've still never yet resolved the question of why Google gets to lift your entire site's contents and re-serve them in arbitrary ways to their own profit in the first place. It's really just a thing that happens on the internet because it was happening on the internet before the lawyers got there. I've said before and still believe that if there was no such thing as a search engine and they were just invented today, they'd be annihilated in court as nothing but one big copyright violation.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#203For me, the issue is not that search queries can now answer simple calculations or inane celebrity trivia without requiring clickthroughs to ad-ridden sites. It's what comes afterwards, when Google inevitably starts answering queries on complex issues around medicine, politics, society or the economy with a pithy snippet grabbed from what it's machine learning thought was representative. We've already seen that vast…
Google at least seems to be reacting to the Anti-vax and other medical inaccuracies by policing medical content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
On top of all that, Google's snippets aren't curated and therefore, aren't always correct. They can be (and almost certainly are) gamed. Users that don't click through open themselves up to carrying on being misinformed.
The websites that the results aren't curated either. Clicking through to the site could provide the same incorrect information.
sometimes the blurb just has an answer to a different question. Websites are curated, unless its spam.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#205I've actually lost traffic on https://wtfismyip.com/ since Google started doing this: https://www.google.com/search?q=wtf+is+my+ip
It might help to say "what is my regular IP address" since so many that search this don't want their IPv6.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#206Earlier 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.
Also the data they are serving is often incorrect or outdated. I've grown accustom to not trusting these info boxes.
Yep. And what's worse is that sometimes the site is correct and/or up to date and the Google snippet attributed to that site isn't or is poorly chosen for the question.
Google "chancellor" from the UK and it'll suggest the question "who is the UK chancellor now" which expands to name the previous chancellor (an error Google attributes to gov.uk which would have been updated in July with the new appointment). Click on the link to Google the question and this time the snippet attributed to the same source will be up to date and give you the correct answer. But if I still need to load a new page to get the right answer I'd preferred to go direct to the source page without it serving me wrong answers wrongly attributed first.
And the other questions are also a rabbithole of rubbish to fall down (the question "who was the previous chancellor?" answered by "previous chancellors have opted for whisky..." is my favourite combination) or excerpt the wrong part of the page and then encourage you to search Google again to get the same unhelpful excerpt again rather than deign to look at the source period.
Getting this stuff right across millions of queries and unstructured data of mixed quality is undoubtedly an incredibly hard technical problem but I think it's probably better to sometimes let users leave Google properties than feed them inaccurate answers inaccurately attributed...
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#207So 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…
So it's a case where the webmasters get greedy, and google steals their food, and everyone cheers for google. I 'm starting to think we need search engines to go back to their beginnings, when they were crawling the web , not creating or replacing the web. If they are only pointing to the websites, but rank them by speed, then webmasters would compete who will answer the question faster.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#208WAAAY more than half of my google searches show the answer at the top.
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Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#209Article should be: Avast antivirus users click less than half of google searches. Their data isn’t representative of the market broadly. For one thing Microsoft claims bing has 9% market share, while avast pegs it as 1.4% market share. https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/8982080475...
It's even more biased than this because it's desktop-only, Windows-only population. Mobile is HUGE.
From the article's "Methodology notes":
> That includes millions of Android-powered devices and millions of PCs as well. They have much lower coverage on iOS devices and so don’t report on visit data from those browsers.
I'm not saying that their sample is not heavily biased, but they do claim that it's not a desktop-only dataset.
Re: Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click
#210Does anyone else use search at least a dozen times a day just for spellchecking a word or confirming a phrase? I find myself pasting phrases into the search bar when autocorrect or spellcheck just doesn't do the trick. I'd love to know what percentage of "searches" were never actually looking for a target.