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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

#401

Post by drivebycomment »

ALittleLight wrote: post #69
buboard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, i am noticing a steady decline in adsense RPMs for the exact same audience over past 2 years, and adsense is now most of the time not filling the ad slot. Also, it has gotten very hard to rank in google for new sites. SEO blackhat tactics rule, and even local businesses use them. Google went from win win to win-get lost. Sadly, now that webmasters need it the most, investments in alternatives to search a…

I feel the same way about ranking new websites. In high school, friends and I made a website for which we did zero search engine optimization (nor were we even aware of search engine optimization). We still ranked in relevant queries and easily got an audience of about ten thousand uniques a month. Today, I struggle to get sites I make to show up on Google at all. For my most recent website, even searching for phrase…

I don't know how old you are, so it's hard to tell how long ago you're comparing. But how do you know if this isn't simply because there are a lot more content than it used to be ?

https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/ indicates the number of web sites is still growing at breakneck speed.

Somewhat dated but still relevant:

https://searchengineland.com/googles-search-indexes-hits-130...

says the growth rate for the number of pages to be still substantial.

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

#402

Post by inetknght »

baroffoos wrote: post #392
inetknght wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try a local news site with Firefox's Reader Mode. If it's still garbage then the local news site isn't worth any more time whatsoever. Keep a running mental list of what sites not to click on. They're typically in the top 1-10 links of search results.

I wish I could hit reader mode before the page loads so my phone doesn't melt in the time it takes for the page to finish loading its 10000 js frameworks.

If you're following a link, then copy the link and paste it into the URL bar. Before you hit enter, prepend with `about:reader?url=`.

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

#403

Post by [deleted] »

jefftk wrote: post #375
wbl wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't like the product? Switch. While you still can.

Any search engine is going to want to know what people click on so they can make their product better. For example, I just searched for [test] on DuckDuckGo and when clicking on the first result I see DDG sending a ping back: https://improving.duckduckgo.com/t/lc?... which contains which URL I clicked. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

[deleted]

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

#404

Post by ses1984 »

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…

Does it matter if they have a policy against scraping? I thought that was explicitly legal, which enables their existence.

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

#405

Post by nitrogen »

In some cases could this be because fewer than half of searches are returning relevant results? For my part I've been having a really difficult time finding things in Google lately. Even with search personalization on, results are just.. completely off the mark.

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

#406

Post by Ruthalas »

prawn wrote: post #398
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.

I stick with Google but increasingly try to tweak my searches to hit forums. They're just that much less likely to be made-for-AdSense content by a copywriter paraphrasing other information from the web.

Do you have any tips for this sort of search tailoring? It's something I try for, but I've yet to find any particularly good keywords to leverage.

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

#407

Post by millstone »

BigJono wrote: post #393
elorant wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that the content Google features is the best there is? If we stop clicking on sites and just rely on Google to provide us the content we'll go down a very slippery slope.

I don't really see how this problem is any different to 'how do we know the #1 search result is the best content there is?', if it provides you the information you want, then great, otherwise you load #2.

Google lends the weight of its authority to the answers it presents. It's one thing if Infowars says that Obama is planning a coup against Donald Trump, it's another if Google says so.

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

#408

Post by igravious »

jefftk wrote: post #374
igravious wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my God! This is so useful! I hate that I can't right-click on a search result to copy a URL. We definitely used to be able to do this, didn't we?

Hmm, right clicking and copying works for me in Chrome and Safari. I just tried searching for "test" and the first result is marked up as: Looking at https://caniuse.com/#feat=ping it looks like ping is supported in Chrome, Safari, and Edge, but not Firefox; are you using Firefox? (Disclosure: I work for Google)

I use both. I'll use this "Google search link fix" extension in Firefox until search results links aren't proxied.

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

#410

Post by kerng »

Google, the content thief.

It's amazing how they can get away with this, while at the same time not allowing others to scrape their sites. The actual content creators probably see significantly less traffic because of this - without ever knowing what the actual traffic could have been... there should be some kind of pay it forward/revenue sharing that Google should do. But that would be not being evil.

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