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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

#451

Post by londons_explore »

arcturus17 wrote: post #411
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…

> Google has a policy against scraping their results, but their whole business model is predicated off scraping other sites and making money off the content Yea a couple days ago I was checking the Places API, which they’ve built off user-generated content and scraping Yelp and others. They charge $17 / 1000 calls for certain items and don’t you dare cache anything for too long. Great way to build a business: get dat…

I downloaded all the places data for the world while it was still free. In my jurisdiction, the data is considered owned by the place owners rather than Google, so I doubt they'll come after me.

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

#452

Post by londons_explore »

reaperducer wrote: post #273
squeaky-clean wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found them to be incorrect so often on things when I would click through to the actual page or find a better link. I don't trust just the blurb for any answers any more.

I don't trust just the blurb for any answers any more. I don't, either. A site I used to own had a discussion forum on it. It contained a message along the lines of "Real Estate Agent X is a great guy. Real Estate Agent Y is a complete sleazebag." The blurb that Google displayed for it was "Real Estate Agent X... is a sleazebag." And that was the first result for anyone who searched for that agent's name. As you can…

I think there's more to this... Google use lots of fancy Natural Language Processing stuff to extract that data, and unless the wording was very tortuous, I doubt it could make such a big mistake by chance.

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

#453

Post by londons_explore »

rhizome wrote: post #272
sli wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of all that, Google's snippets aren't curated and therefore, aren't always correct. They can be (and almost certainly are) gamed. Users that don't click through open themselves up to carrying on being misinformed.

This is especially true where the answer is time-bound, which happens a lot in technical topics. Many times the snippet is for an earlier version of the language (but still with a high PageRank), or the Operating System (especially Android settings), and the most annoying at all: an ancient answer in an undated blog post.

Google is good at dating undated content. They keep track of the first time they've ever seen a bit of text, and assume it was composed then, even if it later gets copied to other sites.

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

#454

Post by millstone »

playpause wrote: post #429
millstone wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know that sort of thing happens sometimes (Google presenting a spurious statement as a categorical answer) but those are bugs. As long as they are very rare, and fixed quickly when they occur, I don’t see them causing much harm. OK, some people believe anything they read (especially if it confirms their existing biases), but that problem has always existed. I think Google’s occasional snippet fuck-ups are a drop in…

There's the modern news-cycle axis, where Google can and should devote full-time engineers.

But the long tail is important too. It's fixed now (yay) but for years you could search for "calories in corn" and Google would confidently present an answer 5x the true value, scraped from a site with profoundly wrong information. As Google moves to present more direct answers and fewer links, this risk increases.

It looks like they have backed off on the direct answers somewhat which is good news.

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

#455

Post by melomal »

Started to see a huge drop in any content that was educational or broad since the start of this year.

SERPs that I have been targeting have gone from 10 results to 7 with the rest being snippet information or images. Crazy stuff and basically pushing you into Adwords even more.

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

#456

Post by buboard »

telotortium wrote: post #378
mthoms wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're looking for legal loopholes. Which is absolutely fine for a business to do. Just don't use phrases like "from a moral standpoint..." when you really mean "from a legal standpoint..." . Moral and legal aren't the same thing.

I don't believe Google has a moral obligation to send traffic to the sites that appear in its search results, any more than a book has an obligation to be bought or borrowed from the library by the readers of a short quote from that book in another book. So, for me, it is a moral question as well.

> don't believe Google has a moral obligation to send traffic

Bizzare. The only reason google gets traffic is because of those sites. Your comparison is also off, google is not another book (they dont create content), it's the librarian telling people which book to borrow.

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

#457

Post by mirimir »

> This suite of products, in order to function, must collect and analyze every URL visited by every browser of every machine on which its installed. ...

That's why these products are privacy nightmares.

Bitdefender has admitted that it compromised a user.[0] That was a major case. I'm sure that many other users have been hosed, in less newsworthy ways.

> Because Avast has to see and process all these URLs anyway (in order to serve their function of providing web security), they anonymize, aggregate, and remove any personally-identifiable information from the browser URL visits and then provide them to Jumpshot, who then makes estimates about broad web usage behavior.

There's no reason why URLs need ever be uploaded.

0) https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/massive-blow-to-...

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

#458

Post by kaolti »

henryfjordan wrote: post #292
reaperducer wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just got one of those emails for the first time about my personal site that's basically my resume. Apparently my text is small on mobile (it's not...) and some other crap I don't get why google thinks it's acceptable to critique my site without prompting. It honestly just feels rude. They want me to do a whole bunch of micro-optimizations on a site that already works fine because it doesn't fit their standard of "h…

Google has grown into a cancerous middleman.

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

#459

Post by Iv »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

This is the subtle truth that I've seen a few folks on Twitter talking about for the past year or so: That Google has slowly but steadily reduced both the outbound clicks to other websites, but also the portion of their revenue that's based on ads hosted by other websites, while bringing both the "results" and the ad placements in-house, where they no longer have to pay out a share to site owners. Whereas Google was…

I think most of my zero-click search are a quick question on something you can find at wikipedia.

Well, I don't see the problem at google providing a cache to save WP's bandwidth. I block ads anyway...

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

#460

Post by mkl »

buboard wrote: post #445
gniv wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There is an implicit contract Then why can't publishers scrape google?

From http://www.google.com/robots.txt:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /search
    ...
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