Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by grogenaut » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:03 PM UTC

henryfjordan wrote: post #292

reaperducer wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results. It's for this reason that's I've stopped embedding micro data in the HTML I write. Micro data only serves Google. Not my clients. Not my sites. Just Google. Every month or so I get an e-mail from a Google bot warning me that my site's micro data is incomplete. Tough. If Google wants to use m…

I just got one of those emails for the first time about my personal site that's basically my resume. Apparently my text is small on mobile (it's not...) and some other crap I don't get why google thinks it's acceptable to critique my site without prompting. It honestly just feels rude. They want me to do a whole bunch of micro-optimizations on a site that already works fine because it doesn't fit their standard of "h…

Yeah it's amazing how rapidly and rabidly they show up when the complaint is on one of their paid features like a Google cloud (GCE) post for them or a competitor, but nada on the other products. Well no it's actually not surprising.

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

#322

Post by icebraining » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #180

icebraining wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Section 230 didn't prevent Google from being fined $500M for publishing ads for Canadian pharmacies selling drugs to US citizens. What kind of illegal activities are you talking about, exactly?

Google regularly distributes malicious websites and malware through ads, and refuses to delist reported malicious websites. (Google Ads is the primary distributor of Windows PC malware today, if my customer support experience is any indication.) And the problem is that Google has a perverse incentive: More bidders for ads means higher bids. Since malicious actors raise the prices, they benefit from bad actors selling…

More clicks on ads that lead to malware also leads to fewer clicks in the future, though.

Have you published data about this anywhere, like a list of reported links that were ignored?

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

#323

Post by dx87 » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:04 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #313

I'm trying to really understand the problem here. 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 experienc…

The problem is that people may stop making sites that tell you the airspeed of an unladed swallow if Google's snippets mean that they never get any visitors on their site. Then Google search won't be able to help you because there aren't any sites to copy snippets from. As for the comparison to ad blockers, I think the situation is different. I doubt people install ad blockers just because they don't like ads; they don't like the slow websites, privacy, and security implications associated with targeted ads. Search snippets are punishing sites just because they aren't Google.

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

#324

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:06 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #313

I'm trying to really understand the problem here. 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 experienc…

Dictionary or acronym definition sites which cram their preview with a ton of useless boilerplate (most of which also litters their page) is a growing Modern Frustration.

Most of the time I've got dict or some hand-tuned extractor scripts which can pull the information for me, though if I'm away from those the experience remains annoying and convinces me to actively seek down the page for the first result which does NOT do this.

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

#325

Post by wolco » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:09 PM UTC

concert-gilled wrote: post #116

sli wrote: post #109

Earlier 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.

Those are sites google chooses are correct.

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

#326

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:09 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #195

iClaudiusX wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The increasing sprawl of non-search widgets invading the search result page reminds me of the AOL years where "the web" was funneled through a narrow portal controlled by one entity. Having to scroll down past ads, unrelated news, unrelated youtube videos, and ever more of these info boxes has pushed the actual content I'm looking for out to the second page. It's made it much easier to use ddg as default and use the…

And the downfall of AOL was Google because Google had a better product. In order for google to fall, you need a product that's better (or more of what people want; you need to give them a reason to change their search engine).

... and that product will likely repeat the cycle again, on some schedule of another. Might be the 20+ years of Google, might be the few years that Medium was only modestly annoying, might instantly go to shit.

The problem is the business model breeds for this, and we end up replacing one abusive monopoly with another, until we can break that cycle.

For a time it seemed Free Software might ... free us ... from that, though as even that effort's biggest boosters (Eben Moglen, Bradley Kuhn, RMS) freely admit these days, we've been regressing of late, and at an increasing rate.

What's it going to take?

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

#327

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:10 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #290

root_axis wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not nearly enough room on the front page for everyone that wants to be there, google has to make subjective decisions about what shows up there, it's impossible to do it any other way.

They could randomize it. Allow everybody to be on the front page an equal number of times.

Then it's spam farms as far as the eye can see, because they can enter a hundred times as much as everyone else.

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

#328

Post by wolco » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:13 PM UTC

milesskorpen wrote: post #311

cyrusshepard wrote: post #86

I think what folks are missing is that a lot of these "zero-click" searches happen as a result of Google scraping your website, and displaying the results as a "featured snippet." Yes, they link to you below the featured snippet. No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results. For example: If I'm searching for "best nail for cedar wood" G…

This is good for users ... for now. 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.

They could but the hobbists sites are no longer in the serps.

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

#329

Post by wolco » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:15 PM UTC

gniv wrote: post #287

cyrusshepard wrote: post #86

I think what folks are missing is that a lot of these "zero-click" searches happen as a result of Google scraping your website, and displaying the results as a "featured snippet." Yes, they link to you below the featured snippet. No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results. For example: If I'm searching for "best nail for cedar wood" G…

I disagree. There is an implicit contract between website publishers and search engines that it’s ok to do this. The website can set nosnippet in robots if they want to not have the snippet in search results.

It should be opt-in.

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

#330

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:17 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #105

luckylion wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but a collection of facts ("a database") falls under copyright.

Not sure why you are downvoted. In the EU databases fall under copyright, which indeed leaves the question how google legally deals with this (technically database right isn't copyright, but in this context that's a technicality). Also, to quote from the Wikipedia article [1]: An owner has the right to object to the copying of substantial parts of their database, even if data is extracted and reconstructed piecemeal…

> Not sure why you are downvoted.

Because they didn't say "in the EU", and it not being copyright is not just a technicality. Copyright is about creative expression, and utilitarian collections of facts aren't.