Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

But as Google sucks up the consumer surplus, it's going to be harder and harder to make money from internet businesses, and the final result a few years down the road will be toxic.

The internet isn't going to work too well if its solely reliant on hobbyists.

I do understand that people want clicks to their site so that they can get ad views, and that those ad view payments are what pay the hosting bill and reimburse for the effort of generating the info.

Yet from a UX PoV, I simply want to know the airspeed of an unladen swallow. I don't want to click to learn it. That additional friction doesn't improve my user experience, it improves someone else's. Mandating that would turn Google into a splash screen or landing page, and we've gotten rid of those anti patterns for good reasons.

I chose my toy example (unladen swallow) because it's an example where nuance is required (African or European?) and if google's answer box were to obscure that it would be wrong. But if answers that with a "two answers: African x European y, and click here to know more" that is a user-friendly model.

Really objecting to google doing this is like objecting to an ad blocker IMHO. Ad blockers upset sites, but make users happy.

(anti disclaimer and disclaimer: I am not a fan of google, use DDG, and my company has ditched all google services. OTOH my gf works there, though not on anything related to search.)

Sure, that counts as revenue. It's not something I'm going to lose sleep over. I don't exactly think that advertisements should be a profitable "feature" of the internet in its current form.

> Why not? It's not like that they had any other options than trying to extract that information from ad-laden websites.

You completely missed my point. Now that Google "owns" the data and provides the answer, the user won't need to click on a scummy site.

Moreover, casual questions not answered directly by Google are answered by casual browsing. Casual browsing happens with ad blockers. If a site breaks when an ad blocker is in use, users exit the site.

To make a counter point - I was recently researching 'things about various electronic and motorized bicycles / scooters'- a subject which a 'good answer' would be some sort of curated content by a specialist individual who is interested in the topic or a specialized vendor who has lots of 'information pages' - but instead of finding much of this at all, nearly every search went to various amazon / alibaba / ebay pages with very little non-commercial general purpose content available.. (not even manufacturer pages were there really)

and 'conveniently', most of the 'organic content' these days is non-texual and tied to youtube, or hidden on non-indexed facebook groups..

net result: a network effect whereby walled gardens drive organic content off of indexes, indexes become more crowded with commercial content, and then commercial content has to be paid to get to the top of the list to get traffic, and one can go to youtube to be user profiled for targeted marketing - how exactly did my purpose-specific container tab yield targeted ads to a completely separate yahoo mail account again??