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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

#371

Post by D13Fd »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #359
D13Fd wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to do that too. But for product reviews, I am certain that the fake review problem will hit Reddit soon, if it hasn't already. This technique is way too common, and manufacturers are going to start including Reddit in their fake-review spam just like they do with Amazon reviews. It's only a matter of time.

Something that might help is that reddit has voting, so astroturfing requires fooling users which lots of blogspam wouldn't.

The problem with that is that upvotes can be faked too.

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

#372

Post by hunter-2 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #256

I'm confused by the top comment using this headline to complain about the quality of results. The quality of results is obviously irrelevant to the fact that most searches do not result in clicks. Google specifically tries to answer your question on the result page: "nifarious" - oh, it's spelled "nefarious" "1000 USD in CHF" - aha, about 1000 swiss francs 4 tablespoons in cups - 1/4 cup "how old is taylor swift" - 3…

>The quality of results is obviously irrelevant to the fact that most searches do not result in clicks.

Disagree. It's completely relevant. There are two reasons why people do not click on search results - either because they got the answer directly from the rich snippets (like you suggest), or because the results are so trash that you need to now perform another search to narrow the results further.

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

#373

Post by emrah »

Google's zero-click answers are really good, especially if I search for a fact.

While it's true that this is possibly killing sites by preventing traffic flow, it's one way to battle content padding for the sake of grabbing traffic.

It might be an interesting move if Google were to pay a small fee to sites whose information was useful for a particular search, like those I chose to expand.

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

#374

Post by lmm »

another-dave wrote: post #104
vkou wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you force the term to stay, you'll get two search results, neither of which answer your question. The web of 2021 sucks.

I'd prefer to recognise immediately that there are no results & reframe my query that to start to scan down through the results, maybe click into one & start to read only _then_ to realise it doesn't relate, back to Google — "oh, they didn't actually search for what I told them to search for" & then reach the same point they could've given me at the start. At least there should be a checkbox for "make a best guess wh…

> At least there should be a checkbox for "make a best guess when limited results" / "give me my exact search query" (maybe there is somewhere & I've missed this)

There is, one of the drop-downs gives you the option of "all results" or "verbatim".

It doesn't actually work, of course.

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

#375

Post by ratww »

samatman wrote: post #242
dmart wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe for a second that Google's algorithms are unable to identify and remove content marketing blogspam from the results. It must be profitable somehow for the majority of search results to be utterly useless.

The point of content marketing blogspam is to pester the reader with AdWords and the occasional affiliate link. Old-school useful content is rarely monetized, just someone sharing their passion for something. Occasional affiliate link, with the obligatory apologetic "hey web servers cost money, so I included some affiliate links here!" The uselessness is just a side effect of Google directing you toward paying custom…

You're thinking of Content Farms. I think the current villain is Content Marketing, which is to attract people to your website without paying for AdSense, via an inane blog post. Like the Michelin guide or Guinness book did before the internet.

The reason Google keeps those results near the top is because it drives up the cost of AdSense, since multiple competitors are fighting for the first page of organic results with those tactics, and AdSense is a way to "cut the line".

The result for users is that the first page of most result pages is littered with advertisement, either via real AdSense or with those inane marketing blog posts.

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

#376

Post by asddubs »

londons_explore wrote: post #191
BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic…

Everyone please post examples of search terms that have gotten worse. Specifically, it's handy to have the query, and the URL that you think would be the best result. Google engineers can then peer in and see why that URL didn't rank highly. The most common reason is it's behind an invisible captcha or blocked by robots.txt, so do check that.

yesterday I was trying to figure out how to look up the nameservers of a domain including the vanity/parent nameservers using a tool like nslookup or host, it took me a good 10 rephrasings before i found a stackoverflow post answering the question, and not just a tutorial on how to set up vanity nameservers at X registrar/hosting company

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

#377

Post by abryzak »

tfehring wrote: post #342
Retric wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what’s the point of using Google? In terms of AGI, we have that if Google where to say employ people to look at say the top million searches and heavily penalize junk they could make real headway. Personally, I swapped to DuckDuckGo in 2019 and have been consistently happier but Bing or whatnot is probably equally valid at this point.

I use DuckDuckGo by default but I probably add !g to redirect to Google 2/3 of the time. DDG seems to be a little bit worse about rewarding user-hostile SEO spam [0], but honestly the main reason is that with Google I can use [1] to block those domains. DDG is also still noticeably worse for vague or complex queries IME. [0] When I search "postgres array_agg" on DDG - something I actually had to search for today - th…

I sometimes find myself going to Google for some complex queries or obscure error messages as well, but I'll usually try an alternative query first.

In this case, DDG happens to have a bang shortcut for postgres which takes you directly to the search results on the PostgreSQL site if you query !postgres array_agg.

There's a surprisingly large number of these which end up making it more useful than the generic web search results page overall.

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

#378

Post by sdefresne »

nonameiguess wrote: post #270
ratww wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this is Content Marketing. People use SEO tools to gauge how good a blog post is going to rank, and the current sweet spot seems to be around 1000 words, so they end up filling it with fluff. Some of those are even machine generated. The answer to the "can cats eat X", of course, can't be at the beginning or at the end. The reason is that the user must stay a long time and read the text, otherwise Google punishe…

I use DuckDuckGo and haven't used Google in years, but searching "can cats eat asparagus" shows three answers above the fold just in the snippets without even needing to go to the page. Yes, they can, apparently, and it's perfectly safe. No ads in the results, either.

I get the same thing using Google search. Three results with the answer in the snippet.

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

#380

Post by zo1 »

Arnt wrote: post #82
BitwiseFool wrote: post #15

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic…

Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how good they were a decade ago. Because every search I've done today produced the result I wanted on the first page of the results, above the fold. I can't say I've really counted how many days that's true. I can't even say that I really remember what searches I did yesterday or the day before. But if I'm not totally weird and google searches were dramatically bett…

You can't even compare it anymore, as the web is dramatically different now than it was a decade or so. Just the amount of blogspam that has accumulated in those ten years, all caused by Google's ad-meddling is enough to drown out the minuscule amount of "unique" or "good" content that existed back then or is being currently created.
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