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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

#491

Post by checktheorder »

zaat wrote: post #483
checktheorder wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you asking for a hypothetical scenario where I was the web developer in question having to stand up to some marketing drone? Take a closer look at the key phrase in my post: "makes no effort". If a web developer who's trying to pay the rent makes even a single comment to the marketing drones about how email signup forms might not be a good idea, and asks if they're sure they want to do it, then that web developer…

I was asking because I have been thinking if there are any convincing arguments or incentives for avoiding such tactics, besides moral and integrity. I'm afraid that if's all depend on moral and integrity it is unlikely we are going to win this battle.

Morals and integrity are foreign concepts to marketers. I used to think that marketing had a place, if properly used. After working with marketers for a decade, I just consider them and their whole wretched field a lost cause. I have no sympathy, no empathy, no compassion for any of them. Nowadays I make every effort to use only paid services whenever possible. (If any Fastmail devs are reading... I frickin' love you guys.)

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

#492

Post by 4ntonius8lock »

icebraining wrote: post #322
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google regularly distributes malicious websites and malware through ads, and refuses to delist reported malicious websites. (Google Ads is the primary distributor of Windows PC malware today, if my customer support experience is any indication.) And the problem is that Google has a perverse incentive: More bidders for ads means higher bids. Since malicious actors raise the prices, they benefit from bad actors selling…

More clicks on ads that lead to malware also leads to fewer clicks in the future, though. Have you published data about this anywhere, like a list of reported links that were ignored?

> More clicks on ads that lead to malware also leads to fewer clicks in the future, though.

I really doubt this works this way. There's 3 assumptions here, for your scenario to play out, people must pass the following funnels:

1- The person notices the malware

2- The person associates the connection between the ad and the malware.

3- After making the connection they install a non-dummy adblocker. Dummy adblockers like the one by Eyeo whitelist google's ads while actually harming the competition. It benefits them! Note: if I look up adblock on google, uBlock is only mentioned on page 2 of google and only because it's mentioned as a competitor to adblock on a zdnet article. The first whole page is dedicated to the Eyeo plug in.

I'd say very few people will get through that funnel. My experience is that when my family and friends actually seek out help with their computers, they have let it go for years until the computer is a slow mess of malware, self installed spyware in the form of browser add ons and other crazy stuff.

I've actually known a person who buys a computer every couple of years when it 'gets slow' simply to avoid maintenance. The few that I know from IRL relationships that do use an adblock, mostly use adblock by Eyeo, simply because of the domain and ranking on google.

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

#493

Post by dyarosla »

tremon wrote: post #469
wutbrodo wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Micro data only serves Google. Not my clients. Not my sites. Just Google. Well it also serves Google's users, to be clear. Though I should also be clear that I don't think that justifies it, since I think it's bad for the ecosystem in more subtle ways than are expressed in immediate user satisfaction.

That depends on how you define "users". If you define a website creator also as a Google user (by virtue of wanting to be found through Google ), then Google is serving part of its users to the detriment of their other users. And if you view Google instead as a connection broker, e.g. a middle-man between publisher and consumer, then Google is destroying their own business by snubbing publishers. Assuming that Google…

Did Google ever see itself as prioritizing publishers and consumers equally? I think that’s a false premise and the parent is right; Google’s priority has always been consumer first.

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

#494

Post by ummonk »

concert-gilled wrote: post #472
ummonk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get 5 decimal places if you divide by 1000...

Thanks, I missed that. I was just looking at the number of decimal places. Is that method accurate? (1000 * incorrectly_rounded) / 1000 == incorrectly_rounded

It's not incorrectly rounded. It's correctly rounded to two decimal places in either case. Two decimal places just isn't enough digits when you give it 1 USD, so you have to give it 1000 USD.

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

#495

Post by 4ntonius8lock »

Nasrudith wrote: post #141
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the inherently problem is that they need to be held liable for the rest. Because the rest is often criminal activity of which those platforms are making a profit. Perhaps removing Section 230 isn't enough , by your definition, because we need a law that explicitly holds platforms liable for profits generated from illegal activity.

That is a curious definition of need. Are landlords liable in your world for renting apartments to people who run ponzi schemes?

Not in my world; planet earth is a large place.

But in the country I live in, the USA, landlords are liable for many things their tenants do.

A friend of mine is a landlord and he almost lost a house he owns because his tenant was cooking meth in it. I don't remember the exact details, but the liability was no joke.

P.S. I don't agree with this liability issue, I'm simply describing reality as it is.

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

#496

Post by jefftk »

ademarre wrote: post #489
jefftk wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blog post you link has a bunch of alternatives, but I agree they're not great. If there are a lot of webmasters who want to be able to noindex through robots.txt then making the case for adding noindex to the standard would be a good next step. (Still speaking only for myself)

Googlebot actually used to support a noindex rule in robots.txt, but they are removing it. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/a-note-on-unsuppor...

Yes, that was linked above. It looks like this is part of reducing support to what's in the spec?

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

#497

Post by stordoff »

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.

I agree, but there are two differences IMO:

* Ads have tracking and security implications. For clicking though to a site, that is far less the case (an individual site can't correlate my visits across multiple sites, whereas an ad network can).

* Going to the site at least gives an opportunity to present alternative monetisation strategies (direct payment or donations, or selling additional content/services - depending on the nature of the site). If you are just getting the information from the Google page, that disappears.

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

#498

Post by henryfjordan »

jefftk wrote: post #366
henryfjordan wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was curious what it was complaining about, since https://henryfjordan.com looks great to me. I tried to run it through Google's "Mobile Friendly Test" but fetching failed [1] because your robots.txt has: User-agent: * Disallow: / This would explain why you've gotten zero clicks from Google (or I would guess anyone else's) search results! On the other hand, it's surprising that you would get a notification if you ha…

Oh, I just added that yesterday as a response to the email. Before that I was actually running Google Analytics but since I get basically 0 clicks it wasn't really useful.

I have a feeling the PDF viewer triggered it, cause on Mobile it defaults to showing the whole page which results in tiny text but that's easily fixed by the user so I prefer to leave it like that.

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

#500

Post by machiaweliczny »

Ruthalas wrote: post #406
prawn wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I usually add site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com etc. Actually google had a way to search discussion gruops, but they removed this feature as forums don't pay for their adds I suppose.
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