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In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

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Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#331

Post by ori_b »

SilverRed wrote: post #330
ori_b wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the point. The observation is that Google makes money from eyeballs on ads. The reason they make money is that they can lead people to the content that they want. The content that they want comes from websites, which benefit from the traffic google sends their way. If Google stops sending traffic their way, they won't block google in robots.txt: they'll simply shut down, because they're not making money of…

The value of any individual site on google is quite low, there are plenty of other sites to use. If a significant number of sites decided to pull their content from google and make deals with bing, google would reconsider how they operate. There is no need to have governments force companies to pay each other when they are free to share content or not share. The government should however ensure there are no monopolie…

You missed the point again. This isn't about forcing anyone to pay. This is about Google strangling their ecosystem in exchange for some short term growth.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#332

Post by deckard1 »

searchableguy wrote: post #24

Google provides instant answers for most medical queries, calculations, celebrities, sports, news, weather, how-tos, definitions, reviews, map, shopping, images, etc. Most people don't search outside of queries that google can answer from their own sources frequently so this seems plausible.

Those instant answer cards are often wrong. Perhaps more troubling are the instant answers Google gives you but you aren't aware they are wrong. It's the Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Considering 2/3rd of searches end there, I wonder how many people are walking around with false information that Google fed them.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#333

Post by SilverRed »

ori_b wrote: post #331
SilverRed wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of any individual site on google is quite low, there are plenty of other sites to use. If a significant number of sites decided to pull their content from google and make deals with bing, google would reconsider how they operate. There is no need to have governments force companies to pay each other when they are free to share content or not share. The government should however ensure there are no monopolie…

You missed the point again. This isn't about forcing anyone to pay. This is about Google strangling their ecosystem in exchange for some short term growth.

The OP post was about having governments force this exchange. If you are talking about google optionally taking part in it, I'm sure the finance people at google are capable of working out when its worth it on their own.

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#334

Post by Nition »

pkamb wrote: post #320
typon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For pretty much any product or review related search I just do " reddit" and then scour the somewhat up voted posts for information. Have to deal with tons of dead links though for any post older than a couple of years. The Web really seems like it's an awful place. The original dream of hyper links is really dead. It's all about jumping from walled garden to walled garden through tricks and luck.

1. Search " reddit" 2. AMP page loads 3. "See Reddit in... App or Browser?" banner w/ grayed out page. Tap Browser. 4. Click through the AMP page to the real Reddit page. 5. Second "See Reddit in... App or Browser?" banner w/ grayed out page. Tap Browser. 6. Fail to read the majority of comments, which are hidden by New Reddit. 6. Manually edit URL bar to replace "www." with "old." 7. Read the comments.

For Reddit on mobile, try "i." instead of "old.".

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#335

Post by rvba »

pkamb wrote: post #320
typon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For pretty much any product or review related search I just do " reddit" and then scour the somewhat up voted posts for information. Have to deal with tons of dead links though for any post older than a couple of years. The Web really seems like it's an awful place. The original dream of hyper links is really dead. It's all about jumping from walled garden to walled garden through tricks and luck.

1. Search " reddit" 2. AMP page loads 3. "See Reddit in... App or Browser?" banner w/ grayed out page. Tap Browser. 4. Click through the AMP page to the real Reddit page. 5. Second "See Reddit in... App or Browser?" banner w/ grayed out page. Tap Browser. 6. Fail to read the majority of comments, which are hidden by New Reddit. 6. Manually edit URL bar to replace "www." with "old." 7. Read the comments.

They screwed the address bar so you cannot edit it easily

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#337

Post by judge2020 »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #204
californical wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about Google, but I’ve gotten relevant Stack Overflow code snippets pretty regularly from DDG

But so few people use DDG. It probably isn’t much of an issue for stack overflow. If Google started doing that, my guess is that stack overflow would feel it.

So, do you think it's fine that DDG is doing it? Is the act itself bad, or only the outcome it has due to Google's marketshare?

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#338

Post by judge2020 »

freebuju wrote: post #98
thomascgalvin wrote: post #25

If Google ever started including copy-pasteable code from Stack Overflow, I might never follow a link from Google again. Which I think says a lot about how Google is used now. I don't use Google to find web pages , I use it to find an answer to a pressing question. When I'm looking for something to read, I go to a content aggregator like HN or Reddit. Of course this isn't sustainable. If Google is just presenting oth…

I don't see any reason why Google can't pay for using your website's content on their search engine. Looks to me exactly like the same deal they've been cutting with media owners from Australia & France. The law should cut this side too. For individual content owners as well.

Maybe they should have to pay, especially when doing things like extrapolating content for knowledge panels, but the Australia law has a lot of problems due to the extra provisions (plus that it's applied arbitrarily and not based on criteria)[0].

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26450165

Re: In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

#339

Post by judge2020 »

_ea1k wrote: post #61
bartread wrote: post #32

I suspect a bunch of people might jump on the bandwagon that this is Google repackaging others' content into search snippets and robbing their sites of traffic. No doubt there's some truth to that, but I'd like to indulge in a slightly different flavour of Google bashing on this occasion. The reason I often don't click through on search results is that the search results are garbage - either irrelevant or poor qualit…

I'm seeing very similar issues. Google seems to heavily favor sending people to the sites with the highest content volume instead of the highest quality content. The worst thing is that content creators are manipulating this to build content farms full of low quality content and overwhelming ad volumes. I miss the old web where Google was really great at finding that one guy's blog post that was actually useful.

> instead of the highest quality content

That's a tall order - Google doesn't know the quality of the content, only how popular it is. Right now it's based on data science pooled from existing search result clicks, but originally it was based on the amount of backlinks each site had - so instead of user viewership and satisfaction, it was dependant on the amount of nerds at the time who had already found the site/article useful. The internet has grown enough to mean that everyone else vastly outweighs nerds in terms of backlinks and clicks for any particular topic.

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