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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

#351

Post by gumby »

dx87 wrote: post #323
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 d…

Indeed, that was kind of my first point. I don't know the viability of a model that requires users to jump through an extra hoop (click and wait). That's the "splash screen" or "landing page" problem. I also wonder how many of those sites are really making any money even before ad blocking.

FWIW I block ads because they are intrusive, as well as for speed.

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

#352

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

kryogen1c wrote: post #248
anotheracc wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no trouble believing Google is going to fall. Their results have gone into the toilet - I ragequit Google search about once a day and do something else like forum searches.

Same. I cant tell if my questions are just getting more specific and technical, but Google search results have been getting pretty useless in the past year or so

Same here. It seems the websites that show up top are become more and more spammy and less relevant to my query. I keep seeing all sorts of one sentence hipster 2.0 sites that want me to believe they are a credible source of information.

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

#353

Post by nixpulvis »

gumby wrote: post #338
stordoff wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Have you not seen the problems that have popped up due to the ad blocking arms race?

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

#354

Post by rlanday »

skinnymuch wrote: post #254
rchaud wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but "nuance" and "context" is not what Google is trying to optimize for. They are going for the "instant fact check" audience, like the sidekick gophers on podcasts who look stuff up while the main host and their guest warbles on.

The parent included their biases no proof agenda in their comment. And that seems to be the primary reason for the comment in the first place. I’d say that’s worse than Google.

I cited a government website showing that the population is off by over 200,000 people. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in New York, but it’s full of world-class bullshitters, so much of what you hear about New York is bullshit. Bill de Blasio claimed there were 2 million people standing in Times Square for New Year’s. How in the world could that possibly be true?

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

#355

Post by beatgammit »

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.

This is great! I usually just do something like bs@fake.com.

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

#356

Post by wongarsu »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #330
wongarsu wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Because they didn't say "in the EU"

They also didn't say "in the US". From context you can only assume "in some jurisdiction google cares about"

> Copyright is about creative expression

That's not true, or at least a very US-centric view. The Berne Convention, the international standard for copyright, reads:

"[...] shall include every production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or form of its expression, such as books, [...] works expressed by a process analogous to photography; works of applied art; illustrations, maps, plans, sketches and three-dimensional works relative to geography, topography, architecture or science."

also

"Collections of literary or artistic works such as encyclopaedias and anthologies which, by reason of the selection and arrangement of their contents, constitute intellectual creations shall be protected as such"

That's lots of things that are not exactly "creative expression" (even though exceptions for pure statements of fact do exist).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/283698

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

#358

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

telotortium wrote: post #346
buboard wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I like all the things you listed :) More seriously, from a moral standpoint, I would argue that what's at most a short paragraph extract from a website falls under fair use. I don't believe any site is entitled to clicks from Google's search results page, certainly not for such short snippets, which I believe don't exhibit the level of creativity that deserves denying the right to copy to others. By contrast, the oth…

A dictionary is a collection of short snippets. I find it hard to believe that showing those snippets for whatever word you search falls under fair use. The people doing the hard work of making a dictionary deserve to serve those definitions under their own terms. Or at least some combination of their terms and the user's terms, instead of just google's terms.

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

#359

Post by throwawayjava »

reaperducer wrote: post #267
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…

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…

It does help your clients.

I mean, maybe not yours specifically. But snippets are great for users in the typical case.

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

#360

Post by x0 »

kryogen1c wrote: post #248
anotheracc wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no trouble believing Google is going to fall. Their results have gone into the toilet - I ragequit Google search about once a day and do something else like forum searches.

Same. I cant tell if my questions are just getting more specific and technical, but Google search results have been getting pretty useless in the past year or so

I love how google likes to completely ignore what I'm trying to search for. I wish I could think of an example because it happens to me often, but I can't so I'll make one up.

Imagine you're searching for tail lights for your car or something, but you don't know the size, so you search "Astra tail light size". This might bring up headlights. Wrong but no matter, you'd go on to google "Astra tail light size -headlight -head" or something.

What Google seems to have been doing to me recently is ignoring those negated terms, ignoring quotes, and just giving me the same results again and again. It's really getting annoying. Google seems to assume it knows what I'm looking for, and that my search query is just completely wrong and not what I want.

Note that the car stuff is just an example, I'd expect Google to not give you headlights the second time. It generally but not exclusively happens to me when searching things that are more technical. ESPECIALLY when it's a consumer level thing I'm trying to get info on, Google likes to assume it's giving you errors and you're trying to fix it. Which makes sense for most users, but god it's frustrating when every combination of advanced search parameters you try does nothing!

Google search needs a checkbox or something to turn off it's cleverness and just do an actual search.

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