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Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

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

#331

Post by dredmorbius »

adtac wrote: post #243
checktheorder wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>MortgageSite: HEY! It looks like you're new to this site. Want to get on our mailing list? Dear every web developer in the world who makes no effort to fight your employers' marketing department on this: I hate you.

sometimes I try to mess with sites that ask for an email address for a mailing list by entering their own addresses: like "support@domain.com", "webmaster@domain.com", etc. let them deal with their own spam, then they'll understand.

My go to has been "ceo@example.com" for years.

Or various Five Eyes addresses.

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

#332

Post by stordoff »

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…

> 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.

Long-term (potentially): those sites no longer exist, so there's no way to learn the information with or without a click.

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

#334

Post by buboard »

mrtksn wrote: post #280
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…

If I recall correctly content(news especially) publishers and some Europeans were very angry about that. I think the consensus was that these businesses don't understand the internet.

in that case the news sites did get the click, but they wanted more

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

#335

Post by ocdtrekkie »

cannedslime wrote: post #230
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue you are missing is that the sites Google stole that information from often invested money in gathering it. The CelebrityNetWorth example: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... If Google kills CelebrityNetWorth's revenue, Google no longer can scrape updated data from CelebrityNetWorth, because they killed it already. So Google data gets worse or remains static, which quickly becomes…

Instead of an impossible to implement link tax, how about we just made it illegal for search engines to provide these kinds of "pirate" snippets without an opt-in... Either show meta desc, or don't show it at all. Adjust results by relevancy and pagerank (as they used to do) and everyone is happy.

There's nothing impossible to implement about it, but the marketing from the opposition has been really strong. It isn't even a link tax, for example, but it's detractors have pretty successfully rebranded it.

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

#336

Post by buboard »

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.

> nosnippet

TIL. That's actually a good idea. Does that eliminate all kinds of snippets? NOARCHIVE may also be of use.

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

#337

Post by buboard »

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…

Napster also made users happy. And bittorrent. And libgen. Why the double standard?

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

#338

Post by gumby »

stordoff wrote: post #332
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…

> 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. Long-term (potentially): those sites no longer exist, so there's no way to learn the information with or without a click.

That's the argument against ad blockers, and they seem reasonably popular, and accepted.

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

#339

Post by buboard »

avip wrote: post #244
anotheracc wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has turned an Ocean into a pond - I think we'll all be the better for it once they're gone. Regularly cannot turn up results that I know exist - a modest change that has no relation to the query meaning and the results often turn up. This is not the Google Search Engine I remember.

I had to google turn an ocean into a pond as I was not sure what the phrase entails. I got few images of small cars and your comment. QED

And googling it now brings up your comment!

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

#340

Post by guyzero »

michaelterryio wrote: post #177

The problem seems apparent to me. Google has a monopoly on websites being able to promote themselves. There are plenty of other channels, but none with remotely the reach or trust of the US's overwhelmingly dominant search engine. By dint of this fact, they can steal the content of those who actually produced it. What are you going to do, deindex your site? That's death, because Google is a monopoly. In the short ter…

"Google has a monopoly on websites being able to promote themselves."

Incredibly far from the truth.

"There are plenty of other channels"

Yep.

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