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Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

• ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  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 previously a way for sites to be discovered and for sites to generate revenue, it is increasingly becoming the sole source system where data is scraped and imported into Google, and Google keeps all of the revenue to itself.
  • 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
    Honestly, the second google started owning and promoting their own properties on search results, anti-trust regulators should have jumped on it. I'm really not sure how Google can be protected by Section 230 and at the same time control and publish so much directly. Last time I read an article on the topic, google controls 23% of the top 100 sites.
    • IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
      I've heard a decent amount of wrong takes on Section 230. But this is the most bizarre, yet. Neither the CDA, nor section 230 specifically, create the sort of publisher/platform dichotomy people seem to be hung up on. And Section 230 does exactly the opposite of what people commonly think it does. It's actually right there, in the text: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of (a) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable [...] That seems really easy to understand: you can delete nazi propaganda, porn, bad jokes, or just random user content from your platform without running the risk of thereby assuming liability for the rest.
      • ocdtrekkie 7y ago
        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.
        • Nasrudith 7y ago
          That is a curious definition of need. Are landlords liable in your world for renting apartments to people who run ponzi schemes?
          • martin_a 7y ago
            When they get to know about that fact and do not take steps to end this behaviour, although it would be in their possibilities, they might be held liable, too. So ocdtrekkies point stands, imho. Google is directly profiting from shady activities through their services and therefore has no incentive to control or stop that behaviour. That's a tricky thing.
          • 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
            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.
        • icebraining 7y ago
          Section 230 didn't prevent Google from being fined $500M for publishing ads for Canadian pharmacies selling drugs to US citizens. What kind of illegal activities are you talking about, exactly?
          • ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  • buboard 7y ago
    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 and advertising have dried up. There is almost nothing except G.
    • ALittleLight 7y ago
      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 phrases that are unique to my website doesn't cause it to rank. This is more frustrating to me, because I have a Google ad for my website, which drives all of my traffic - so I know Google knows about my website and what keywords are relevant to it.
      • ummonk 7y ago
        To your last sentence specifically though, I wouldn’t want Google to use ads data to influence non-ads rankings.
      • anotheracc 7y ago
        Google has turned an Ocean into a pond - I think we'll all be the better for it once they're gone. Regularly cannot turn up results that I know exist - a modest change that has no relation to the query meaning and the results often turn up. This is not the Google Search Engine I remember.
        • avip 7y ago
          I had to google turn an ocean into a pond as I was not sure what the phrase entails. I got few images of small cars and your comment. QED
  • luckylion 7y ago
    > Whereas Google was previously a way for sites to be discovered and for sites to generate revenue, it is increasingly becoming the sole source system where data is scraped and imported into Google, and Google keeps all of the revenue to itself. I wondered yesterday: if you provide microdata, Google scrapes it, and you later decide to remove your sites from Google - is Google allowed to keep the microdata and continue to publish it?
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      Removal is irrelevant because Google doesn't rely on a license for its index. robots.txt is a courtesy, not a legal obligation.
    • michaelmrose 7y ago
      If you once communicated the fact that 2+2 is 4 and Joe makes very good spaghetti you own the copyright to the text you published but neither the fact nor the opinion belongs to you in any meaningful way nor should it.
      • luckylion 7y ago
        That's true, but a collection of facts ("a database") falls under copyright.
        • TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
          IANAL, but as long as google is only distributing the individual facts (not the database of facts) they would be in the clear, legally
        • michaelmrose 7y ago
          https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html#data https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html#data This doesn't provide any protection for the underlying facts.
          • 7y ago
  • iClaudiusX 7y ago
    The increasing sprawl of non-search widgets invading the search result page reminds me of the AOL years where "the web" was funneled through a narrow portal controlled by one entity. Having to scroll down past ads, unrelated news, unrelated youtube videos, and ever more of these info boxes has pushed the actual content I'm looking for out to the second page. It's made it much easier to use ddg as default and use the !g flag only when absolutely necessary.
    • judge2020 7y ago
      And the downfall of AOL was Google because Google had a better product. In order for google to fall, you need a product that's better (or more of what people want; you need to give them a reason to change their search engine).
      • anotheracc 7y ago
        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.
        • kryogen1c 7y ago
          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
          • mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
            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.
          • x0 7y ago
            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.
  • Iv 7y ago
    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...
• laputan_machine 7y ago
  I don't think I understand this concept. If I search for something using Google, and don't click on a link, doesn't that mean my search was fruitless? What else do we mean by 'zero-click searches'? Edit: Unless it's the simple '6 x 10' or 'What is the time in London', in which case, are we surprised these queries are handled by $SearchEngine? DDG does the same thing (albeit, uses a third party website and gives credit)
  • cstejerean 7y ago
    I mean that’s could be one explanation for no clicks. But if that would be the primary cause it would imply google’s results are getting worse, which would lead to someone else increasing market share. The primary reason is that google shows you information scraped from other sites directly on the results page so you never have to click on any links for a lot of queries.
  • ialyos 7y ago
    Google can preview results for clicks by exposing a site's content in the search results. E.g if you google Obama you will see a wiki blurb about him on the right
  • mdszy 7y ago
    If you're searching for a quick piece of information, that might be included in the description text, or one of the cards that google might generate for your query (like when doing a calculation, unit conversion, weather query, stock ticker query...)
  • Majromax 7y ago
    > If I search for something using Google, and don't click on a link, doesn't that mean my search was fruitless? No, it could mean that Google itself provided an acceptable answer for you in an infobox. For example, if you search for "San Francisco temperature," the top-of-the-page result is an interactive box showing the current conditions and 24-hour forecast for the city. That's reasonably likely to answer the implied question without redirecting you to another site, so it is an example of a successful "zero-click search."
  • 7y ago
• scott_s 7y ago
  The presumption here, as I understand is, is that a zero-click search happened because Google used one of their inline apps to answer a question. (For example, if I search "population of new york city", I get a big and bold answer along with a graph that shows NYC's population over time, as well as LA and Chicago.) But I'm not convinced that's necessarily true. I frequently search for things to get a general idea of what is out there, and I only skim the results. This is also something I do when I'm refining my search terms. It may take me several iterations to refine my terms until I find something I want to click through to. In this process, I may have three or four no-click searches before I land on a good query, and then I start clicking.
  • ergothus 7y ago
    I've also had several fights with google over my refinements. If I search for 2 words, odds are stupidly high that most of the results will NOT include one of my two words. Thanks Google, for deciding I didn't really mean to type that. I follow up with added quotes, etc to enforce what I actually typed, so there will be a lot of Google-induced churn. Google has focused so highly on the peak that more and more searches - certainly the majority of mine - have been relegated to the long tail.
    • duxup 7y ago
      Yeah I have that problem. -something react something something- Google gives me some results without react and asks if I want to include the word I typed in the box for reasons. Like Google I KNOW the words are popular without "react", that's why I included react to narrow the results. Thanks for ruining my search for me....
    • bitL 7y ago
      DuckDuckGo is lately behaving the same way... Time to find another alternative I guess.
      • Semaphor 7y ago
        DDG is worse, sadly. Unlike Google, they don't tell you they ignored part of your query. And for Google forcing a term is a strong signal and it will show to in the snippet most of the time. For DDG forcing a term is a weak signal and it will often not show up in the snippet and sometimes not at all. I love DDG because of their bangs, but their "let me tell you what you actually wanted to search for"-attitude is pissing me off.
• encoderer 7y ago
  There was a time you could build a meaningful business largely on SEO. (See: Yelp, Zillow). No longer.
  • gscott 7y ago
    Especially now that organic results often don't even show up without scrolling down. I miss the good old days when being the #1 search result meant something!
    • patrioticaction 7y ago
      And also because they've slowly made sponsored results look like organic results to align better with their becoming evil OKRs: https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-google-bing-254332 https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...
  • hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    What I find truly disgusting is how, as a business, you basically have to by adwords against your exact domain name, lest competitors buy it and show up above your organic positioning in search results. Can't think of a better example of a "Google Tax".
• dna_polymerase 7y ago
  As bad as this sounds, I got to say I'm not even mad. The instant answers Google provides seem to come from websites that are mostly unusable, bloated with tracking and other BS that increase load times, and even worse SEO-content (that stuff that repeats words just to have more "relevant" keywords). I don't feel too bad about those pages losing traffic. Longform content, interactive content, blogs, videos, forums and social networks (generally pages you might want to spend more time on) seem to be mostly unaffected.
  • ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    The issue you are missing is that the sites Google stole that information from often invested money in gathering it. The CelebrityNetWorth example: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... If Google kills CelebrityNetWorth's revenue, Google no longer can scrape updated data from CelebrityNetWorth, because they killed it already. So Google data gets worse or remains static, which quickly becomes inaccurate. The EU is attempting to fix this issue with the so-called "link tax" everyone has claimed is horrible for the Internet, but really, it's a way to correct the industry. For Google to have good information to scrape, the content creators need to be fairly compensated for that, or else the whole thing falls apart. Because right now, what Google has done, is acted as a parasite, but a poor one, that actually kills its host.
    • cannedslime 7y ago
      Instead of an impossible to implement link tax, how about we just made it illegal for search engines to provide these kinds of "pirate" snippets without an opt-in... Either show meta desc, or don't show it at all. Adjust results by relevancy and pagerank (as they used to do) and everyone is happy.
      • ocdtrekkie 7y ago
        There's nothing impossible to implement about it, but the marketing from the opposition has been really strong. It isn't even a link tax, for example, but it's detractors have pretty successfully rebranded it.
• cletus 7y ago
  So a common trope in the startup world is the difference between a feature and a company, the idea being that lots of features are masquerading as companies. This inevitably leads to them being shocked--SHOCKED--when some bigger player adds that feature, eating their lunch. I feel the same way about a lot of outbound sites on Google. There are a bunch of things I just don't want to go to another site for. Off the top of my head: - Exchange rates. Although this one I find infuriating because Google doesn't know how to correctly round off exchange rates (as in, there's a standard). This manifests as, say, showing 2 decimal places for AUD/USD when they should be showing 4. - Calculator - Mortgage calculator - Song lyrics That sort of thing. If you go to any sites that provide these sorts of things they're typically "scummy". Lots of ads, lots of Javascript, lots of dark patterns to make you load more page views (eg a mortgage calculator that'll mysteriously take 3 steps/page loads to calculate). I'm glad these are in search results, typically in significantly better versions. And I don't think anyone who runs a site built around a basic formula for interest calculations has any right to complain about it. Of course this will be painted as "where does it end?" but not every surface is a slippery slope. Just look at the likes of Yelp who complains about Google "stealing" their content. Well, Yelp is about one of the scummiest businesses out there. So I won't feel sorry for them, not now, not ever. The one weird case here is AMP. Like I get Google's motivations here. Many companies develop terrible mobile sites that run badly or not at all and AMP IS much faster, generally speaking. Yet still it seems so heavyhanded with seemingly no opt out (on the consumer or publisher side). I don't really understand why Google wants to die on this particular hill.
  • puranjay 7y ago
    I understand your stand, but what Google did with its featured snippets is essentially a form of bait and switch. It encouraged entrepreneurs and creators to create content that could answer specific queries with the promise that Google will drive traffic to their sites. Now Google is using the same content and depriving them of the traffic. That's pretty scummy in my opinion.
    • jasode 7y ago
      >Now Google is using the same content and depriving them of the traffic. I found some instructions[1] that says a website can opt out of Google's Featured Snippets with special HTML code: <meta name=”googlebot” content=”nosnippet”> Are there any cases of websites deliberately opting out of snippets and therefore seeing their referral links (and ad revenue) increase? [1] https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/27/google-featured-snippets-guide-2019/ https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/27/google-featured-sni...
• jasode 7y ago
  As another poster mentioned, it seems logical that some reduction in click-thru-rate happens because of Google's "Featured Snippets"[0]. The Google search results page shows an extract of a web page that likely answers the web surfer's query. We don't know what % of zero clicks was caused by the snippets info box. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+search+"featured+snippets"&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=google+search+"featured+snip...
  • munk-a 7y ago
    I also occasionally use google as a spell checker or to run a quick calculation.
• Invictus0 7y ago
  Do queries to voice assistants count as zero click searches?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• skybrian 7y ago
  Maybe compare this with only reading the headline on Hacker News? We often prefer non-clickbait headlines for good reason. The answer to a question may be simple enough to fit into the headline, but the site will withhold it to get a click. Paywalls also encourage people to skip reading the article. I find I'm a bit annoyed at first, but it fades quickly and I realize the news probably isn't that important anyway.
  • pwython 7y ago
    But Hacker News comments are the best part. The top comment always disagrees with the headline/article. :)
• fromthestart 7y ago
  I didn't see it defined on the page, so I'm wondering, do zero click searches count frustrated users giving up because the first two pages are entirely full of SEO optimized commercial websites when searches are made for informational content? Try searching anything related to researching foundation repair. You get pages upon pages of foundation repair services and biased one pager summaries about certain procedures. Long gone are the days when search queries retrieved educational content - when was the last time you saw results for engineering toolbox, or hyperphysics, or anything other than ads, commercial services, and stack overflow for software related questions? SEO killed search and Google is complicit. I think this has massive ramifications for society - the sources of information are shallower, and people are increasingly unable to notice differentiate objective knowledge sources from commercial websites. The people who are interested in generating and curating true knowledge repositories are probably not interested in paying for SEO, so their efforts are effectively hidden from what amounts to the gateway to the internet.
• buboard 7y ago
  Just remove your microdata and other site-specific metadata. HTML was fine to begin with, its not our problem if facebook or google can't read a <meta description> tag properly. Everyone forgives the transgressions that google does because "it's Google", but when Elsevier does the same thing (appropriating and locking other people's IP for huge profits), they 're starting riots.
  • ska 7y ago
    > but when Elsevier does the same thing [... ]they 're starting riots To be fair, that's a slow burn. Academics have been talking about this for decades now.
    • Nasrudith 7y ago
      Not to mention the issues are apples and oranges - Elsevier is acting as a gatekeeper for public research. Google is at worst exploiting fair use at scale.
• dageshi 7y ago
  This will likely backfire in the long term. People writing content will shy away from writing articles on subjects or which answer questions that google will simply steal and display. Eventually the existing sources will become out of date and google will begin to serve inaccurate information.
  • TekMol 7y ago
    What type of articles would that be? Looking at how complete Wikipedia is, it seems peoples will to write content for free is kind of unlimited. Look at HN. Your opinion is free text number 20688220 written here. Ready for Google to eat. Twenty million texts written. Without any payment at all.
    • dageshi 7y ago
      That content will be much much harder to extract and determine authority than what google is using right now, giving greater chances of it being wrong.
• canadianwriter 7y ago
  When Rand last posted about this it inspired me to look into other channels such as email and social. Basically clicks are disappearing for ALL channels, this isn't just a Google thing, it's a digital marketing thing as a whole. My thoughts here: https://kolemcrae.com/no-more-clicks-makes-me-sad/ https://kolemcrae.com/no-more-clicks-makes-me-sad/
• stanipkiss 7y ago
  It's not their job to send anyone traffic, search engines are about information retrieval, getting traffics off of them is a side-effect that is being phased out. The less clicks a user has to make to get an answer the better experience it is for them.
• weinzierl 7y ago
  What does "Zero-Click Searches" mean exactly? I know that when I search for "1 pound in eur" Google will tell me the answer right away, but these kind of searches can't possible account for 50%. What else am I missing?
  • johnward 7y ago
    One example is "how to tie shoes". It scrapes the content from wikihow and displays it to you. There is no need to click through to the site to see the content. Something similar happens for recipe searches.
  • palunon 7y ago
    I've seen people use Google as a calculator... If you start using it like that, you can make a lot of "searches" very quickly... Add in conversions, zip codes, song lyrics, etc, and I guess you start having a good percentage of searches... Also, do Google image search where you click on an image and don't go through to the actual site count ?
• lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  So I maybe failing to grok this but ~45% of google traffic is "organic" - I search, I find a link I leave google ~5% is as clicks (!) ~50% is zero click - it's common enough a query that google just answers it right there, flights, trains timetables, cinema, exchange rates This is kind of a huge shift and also kind of not important at all Millions of us want, say, cinema listings, and off the back of those listings might easily buy a ticket. I can see this as a huge business for Google and certainly disruptive but I am not sure we are losing much by Google vetting it's dollar instead of the same dollar going to the ticketing company behind a multiplex Is this the old fear about microsoft - that all any ISV was doing was market research for microsoft? If you are a distribution channel selling a barely differentiated product to millions of people - well the writing has been on the wall for a while.
• jnaddef 7y ago
  When I read the title I thought it was going to be an article praising Google, but the author seems to actually think less clicks is bad? I remember back in the early 2000s when I had to click through 1st to 10th result trying to find what I was looking for, sometimes even having to go to 2nd page of results. Now I use search for everything : name of a built-in function, quick calculation, checking the spelling or wording of a sentence, short biography of someone... For none of that I will need to click on the result because the answer is given to me without needing to click anything.
  • jnaddef 7y ago
    I would still recommend clicking on the link for coding issues, sometimes the algorithm will get you a snippet of SO's accepted answer even though it is not correct : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20149304/how-to-set-the-xmx-when-start-running-a-jar-file/20149394 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20149304/how-to-set-the-...
    • zuuow 7y ago
      The correct answer in SO questions is always the most voted one, not the accepted one. I always check for that. I think I've seen SO recently sort the answers of a certain question by number of votes by default but I might be wrong
• pushingice 7y ago
  They're obviously wrong, right there in the headline. Fewer than half of Google searches now result in a click.
  • nerdponx 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_versus_less https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_versus_less
• rogerkirkness 7y ago
  Sidebar: this suggests that ads may be a bit more useful than one would think, in the CPC model.
• knorker 7y ago
  > Maybe I need to stop being disappointed in Google and just start expecting them to lie, mislead, and refuse direct questions Why exactly is it in Google's best interests to reveal internal competitive trade secrets just because someone asked? Or any company, for that matter. If a company discloses information it's because they think they'll gain more from disclosing it than from not disclosing it. So why should you demand that all companies answer all your questions? I'd be interested in examples of lies, though.
• cyrusshepard 7y ago
  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" Google gives me the answer: STAINLESS STEEL - and I never had to click through to the website that gave the answer: https://bit.ly/2MdovdP https://bit.ly/2MdovdP • Yes, this is good for users (it would also be good for users if Netflix gave away movies free) • Overall, the publishers who "rank" for this query receive fewer clicks • Google earns more ad revenue as users stick around on Google longer Ironically, 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 - in many cases never sending traffic (or significantly reduced traffic) to the publisher of the content.
  • sli 7y ago
    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.
    • pbiggar 7y ago
      For a recent search "report amex card stolen", google showed a phone number for a scam who asked for a social security number as soon as you called.
    • minor3rd 7y ago
      People on the web take the risk of being misinformed, clicking or not.
    • concert-gilled 7y ago
      The websites that the results aren't curated either. Clicking through to the site could provide the same incorrect information.
• bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  I think another decreasing search type, going by my own example, is the programming syntax/method name search. If I can't remember exactly the syntax I can often construct a query precise enough that the first result shows enough of the syntax in stackoverflow's accepted answer that I can just proceed from there without clicking through.
• woranl 7y ago
  The title "Less than half..." is pretty meaningless. 0% is less than half, so is 49%.
  • tbirrell 7y ago
    No it isn't. It tells us that more than half of searches are 0-click. It may not be _exact_ but it is meaningful.
• netwanderer3 7y ago
  Ok so Google is a monopoly in this sector that's pretty clear, but what's the real problem here? Their competitors offer inferior products so we don't really have a case. Until they can develop better technology or offer superior products than Google's and still are unable to gain market shares then that's when we will have a real case. Besides, for any business to continue leading long-term in modern days it's inevitable it must seek to become a monopoly, or at least part of a duopoly.
• mruts 7y ago
  I guess this isn’t related, but am I the only one who feels like Google search results are going down hill. Maybe 5 years ago I could find a lot of information from small and big sites. Nowadays, it feels like half the Google is just literally ignoring some of my search terms. And the other half they are explicitly ignoring them by crossing out words because they assume I search the same things as everyone else? I dunno, maybe my queries are getting more complex? But I’m getting a strong feeling that Google is becoming less and less useful as an indexer if the web.
• ac29 7y ago
  For those who skipped the article, this data is exclusively from users who installed Avast "security" products, which apparently are sufficiently invasive that they get this sort of data and sell it to third parties. The article thinks this dataset is close enough to representative to present their conclusions as more or less facts. I'm not sure I'd make the same conclusion.
  • mips_avatar 7y ago
    I don’t trust the avast data. According to Microsoft bing has 9% market share. While avast data shows it as 1.4%. https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/898208047578849280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E898208047578849280&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2Fajax%2Finset%2Fiframe%3Fid%3Dtwitter-898208047578849280%26autosize%3D1 https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/8982080475...
    • acheofgrass 7y ago
      You trust Microsoft's number here? 33% market share in the US? I
      • mips_avatar 7y ago
        I trust Microsoft and avast to not lie about facts as they can get in big trouble for that. Rather I don’t believe this data from avast is indicative of the market broadly.
• tommoor 7y ago
  My main takeaway from this was where the hell are they getting that data? A little digging… apparently if you install Avast antivirus they're tracking all of this and selling /providing to Jumpshot - wow. > Baker said Jumpshot’s data comes from 100 million devices worldwide, whose users have downloaded free security software from partner Avast. The devices include smartphones, laptops and tablets. https://marketingland.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-purchasing-data-other-digital-consumer-insights-to-marketers-246941 https://marketingland.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-...
  • bogwog 7y ago
    This world we live in is terrifying.
    • eof 7y ago
      The world our ancestors lived in was too. We traded one hell for another.
      • icemelt8 7y ago
        Its just data collection not hell. Hell means survival problems, no food or water or war.
  • scohesc 7y ago
    You didn't need to dig through anything - it was right at the bottom of the article.
    • tommoor 7y ago
      so it is.
  • quickthrower2 7y ago
    I'm sticking with my "don't install antivirus" policy. My exception is Malwarebytes which I don't consider a regular AV. Even my fave from 10 years ago AVG seems user hostile (try turning it off, it's not easy!). I'd hate to see what the other's are doing.
• trophycase 7y ago
  I do this all the time. What year did this album come out? Search the name of the album and the year comes up in the sidebar. How old is this celebrity? Search the name of that celebrity and their age comes up in the snippet on the side.
• ryanmercer 7y ago
  To be fair a lot of the time I can get the info I need directly from the search. - I use Google as a calculator and a unit of measure converter including currency - I don't hesitate to "define WORD" when I don't know a word which gets displayed at the top - What is the capital/population/square miles of - Who is/cast of/CHARACTERNAME actor - What muscles are used with movement/machine - synonym/antonym WORD - SONG lyrics/"turn off your mind relax and float down stream" song/'Tomorrow Never Knows' band Actually, every single time I open a Google tab I query "define define" first so that I have the search bar at the top and not in the center of the page. Don't judge me, you do weird stuff too.
  • slx26 7y ago
    if google is your default search engine, just click CTRL + L and write what you want to search. pretty much all browsers support CTRL+L, CTRL+T, CTRL+W, CTRL+(SHIFT)+TAB... which are really useful
• mips_avatar 7y ago
  Article should be: Avast antivirus users click less than half of google searches. Their data isn’t representative of the market broadly. For one thing Microsoft claims bing has 9% market share, while avast pegs it as 1.4% market share. https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/898208047578849280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E898208047578849280&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2Fajax%2Finset%2Fiframe%3Fid%3Dtwitter-898208047578849280%26autosize%3D1 https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/8982080475...
  • persistent 7y ago
    It's even more biased than this because it's desktop-only, Windows-only population. Mobile is HUGE.
    • avian 7y ago
      From the article's "Methodology notes": > That includes millions of Android-powered devices and millions of PCs as well. They have much lower coverage on iOS devices and so don’t report on visit data from those browsers. I'm not saying that their sample is not heavily biased, but they do claim that it's not a desktop-only dataset.
      • persistent 7y ago
        My mistake. I didn't realize anyone was stupid enough to put an antivirus on an Android. Please amend my complaint to say that the sample is biased toward morons.
• andrerm 7y ago
  And with AMP, Google is trying ti do the same with entire sites. In the long run why will we continue to produce content for Google? Google must stop trying to suck the hole world into itself. Google is starting to look like a black hole. And the "it is good for consumers" or "users like it" are just offensive. It's good for Google. It may be good for users today but it's bad for content producers and in the long run it's bad for everyone.
  • lern_too_spel 7y ago
    All the other major search engines also use snippets and AMP precisely because users want it. Should all of them stop too? Can you clearly define the regulation you are proposing to impose on search engines?
• andrerm 7y ago
  And with AMP, Google is trying to do the same with entire sites. In the long run why will we continue to produce content for Google? Google must stop trying to suck the hole world into itself. Google is becoming a big black hole. And the "it is good for consumers" or "users like it" are just offensive. It's good for Google. It may be good for users today but it's bad for content producers and in the long run it's bad for everyone.
• persistent 7y ago
  Google many years ago made an explicit decision that their mission is to inform people, not just drive them away to terrible 3rd party sites.
• LocalTrust 7y ago
  Google Maps is vastly underutilized for search was the most valuable takeaway for me.
• ibudiallo 7y ago
  I have a particular page on my blog that mostly appear as the answer to a question "Can you do X with Y tool". Before Google started displaying it as a snippet, the post was getting decent traffic, and the comments were more somewhat moderate. Then the snippet appeared, and a bunch of negative comments started to appear. To clarify, my answer was not a solid yes or no, but more of my experience with the tool. But Google snippets conveniently answers with a section that says: "It is pointless." User's read the snippet, are enraged, click, don't bother to read the article, jump to the comment and say "YOU ARE WRONG." Now, the controversy brings a decent amount of traffic. But unfortunately, the traffic is not from people reading in the first place.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• QUFB 7y ago
  I've actually lost traffic on https://wtfismyip.com/ https://wtfismyip.com/ since Google started doing this: https://www.google.com/search?q=wtf+is+my+ip https://www.google.com/search?q=wtf+is+my+ip
  • judge2020 7y ago
    It might help to say "what is my regular IP address" since so many that search this don't want their IPv6.
• not_a_cop75 7y ago
  This sounds a lot like "click fraud" only this time "search fraud".
• michaelterryio 7y ago
  The problem seems apparent to me. Google has a monopoly on websites being able to promote themselves. There are plenty of other channels, but none with remotely the reach or trust of the US's overwhelmingly dominant search engine. By dint of this fact, they can steal the content of those who actually produced it. What are you going to do, deindex your site? That's death, because Google is a monopoly. In the short term it seems good for the end user. But in the long term, Google having a monopoly on distributing the world's information seems like an obvious threat.
  • guyzero 7y ago
    "Google has a monopoly on websites being able to promote themselves." Incredibly far from the truth. "There are plenty of other channels" Yep.
• rchaud 7y ago
  For me, the issue is not that search queries can now answer simple calculations or inane celebrity trivia without requiring clickthroughs to ad-ridden sites. It's what comes afterwards, when Google inevitably starts answering queries on complex issues around medicine, politics, society or the economy with a pithy snippet grabbed from what it's machine learning thought was representative. We've already seen that vast swathes of the population can have their vote influenced by Facebook/Twitter posts with a big "Sponsored" tag on them. No nuance, all invective. How do you think that will play out when people will take the snippet at its word and not bother to at least click and get some idea of the author's possible biases, methodological limitations, etc.?
  • judge2020 7y ago
    Google at least seems to be reacting to the Anti-vax and other medical inaccuracies by policing medical content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755
• beat 7y ago
  Also, fewer than half of all HN article link headlines result in a click.
• noonespecial 7y ago
  There are plenty of types searches where I'm now viscerally afraid to click on the results lest it result in a clusterbomb of pages I can't close without multiple dialog boxes shooting out all over. Ublock helps but muscle memory is long.
• new_here 7y ago
  Google benefits by crawling the content everyone else creates and by being the aggregator for consumers. So it’s unfair to use other people’s content for rich snippets and not reciprocate by referring traffic.
• rolltiide 7y ago
  WAAAY more than half of my google searches show the answer at the top. Spelling Definitions Translations Exchange Rates Movie/TV/Video Game aggregate ratings Zip Code for an address and more
• saddestcatever 7y ago
  Does anyone else use search at least a dozen times a day just for spellchecking a word or confirming a phrase? I find myself pasting phrases into the search bar when autocorrect or spellcheck just doesn't do the trick. I'd love to know what percentage of "searches" were never actually looking for a target.
  • fasicle 7y ago
    Yeah I do this all the time. Quicker than opening up MS Word to spellcheck.
  • mopsi 7y ago
    I use search box all the time as a calculator. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • stebann 7y ago
    Yes, absolutely. This is very common strategy among folks whom are working with different languages. Also looking for confirmation in "reverse dictionaries" because Google mistranslates some words.
• gumby 7y ago
  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 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. I chose my toy example (unladen swallow) because it's an example where nuance is required (African or European?) and if google's answer box were to obscure that it would be wrong. But if answers that with a "two answers: African x European y, and click here to know more" that is a user-friendly model. Really objecting to google doing this is like objecting to an ad blocker IMHO. Ad blockers upset sites, but make users happy. (anti disclaimer and disclaimer: I am not a fan of google, use DDG, and my company has ditched all google services. OTOH my gf works there, though not on anything related to search.)
  • cat199 7y ago
    On the other hand, your search is reducible to a single 'answer'. To make a counter point - I was recently researching 'things about various electronic and motorized bicycles / scooters'- a subject which a 'good answer' would be some sort of curated content by a specialist individual who is interested in the topic or a specialized vendor who has lots of 'information pages' - but instead of finding much of this at all, nearly every search went to various amazon / alibaba / ebay pages with very little non-commercial general purpose content available.. (not even manufacturer pages were there really) and 'conveniently', most of the 'organic content' these days is non-texual and tied to youtube, or hidden on non-indexed facebook groups.. net result: a network effect whereby walled gardens drive organic content off of indexes, indexes become more crowded with commercial content, and then commercial content has to be paid to get to the top of the list to get traffic, and one can go to youtube to be user profiled for targeted marketing - how exactly did my purpose-specific container tab yield targeted ads to a completely separate yahoo mail account again??
    • gumby 7y ago
• onetimemanytime 7y ago
  since the 2008 recession Google has tried to avoid sending people to sites, preferring ads and Google sites instead. Each year /update they have tightened the screws. No doubt Google execs are saying, look we still send about 50% of people to other sites, there's a lot more growth opportunity.
• Tactic 7y ago
  Somewhere along the line Google stopped being about finding a website and instead is about answering a question with the answer sometimes being a website. One could argue they have always been an answer engine and they are just getting more direct and precise.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• hinkley 7y ago
  It feels to me like the SEO optimizing folks have gotten out ahead of Google's algorithm. I've been getting back into an old hobby and looking for where to buy supplies or advice on which supplies to buy and it's just all spam, fake sites and low quality products. And it occurs to me that I've been experiencing a lesser version of this for years. Google search just isn't working for me anymore.
  • codingslave 7y ago
    Lots of people in this thread claiming that google is slipping, focusing on the wrong metrics, etc. But I agree, google is losing the battle against SEO and its a really hard battle to win. Eventually there will need to be a shift away from search as we know it to win this game.
  • stebann 7y ago
    Yes, this is also serious threat. SEO and spamming affecting quality of search. Some years ago you could just type some scientific article's title and it would have popped up good references and maybe the pdf version. Even you could find complete books like that and a little of refinement. Now it's all spam, at least for the first pages.
• badrabbit 7y ago
  Maybe a meta tag in html that tells bots to avoid scraping content would help with this?
• einpoklum 7y ago
  First thing's first: --==[ USE AN AD-BLOCKER ]==-- and never see those Google top and ads, and widgets, and what-not, again. I use EFF Privacy Badger + uBlock Origin but to each their own. ---- Now ... the charts are very interesting, but are a misrepresentation in several ways (although not necessarily intentionally). 1. What @cyrusshepard says: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688712 2. Preference for more established / larger / more popular websites in the "organic"/non-ad results. This is something I can't prove, but my and my acquaintances' experience suggests that, gradually (mostly before the last 5 years, i.e. not a new thing by now), Google has shifted toward tending to direct you more to those kinds of sights. Perhaps others have studied this.
• cromwellian 7y ago
  The dream of AI is to build a StarTrek like computer that can read and understand all human knowledge and answer questions about it, synthesizing answers. Web Search for factual answers is a stop gap on that road, but distributed knowledge databases are inexorably going to be centralized, melded, and transformed. The 90s “content is king” business models just aren’t sustainable if what you’re publishing is static mostly factual content.
• balozi 7y ago
  A less techie theory: Witness the rise of the Google Skeptical Search user. In essence, Google search users maybe developing an attitude of skepticism towards the quality and usefulness of the results they receive. It started with news searches and its spreading to everything else search related. The sensing being that Google's search results are not an honest reflection of the information that is available.
• celebnetworth 7y ago
  This is Brian from the website celebritynetworth.com. I submitted the following statement to the House subcommittee on Antitrust detailing the history of Google scraping our information. The TL:DR is that Google approached us about getting an API to our data. We said no. Google scraped the whole site anyways. Google frequently displays our information directly in its results without any attribution in a large snippet that takes up the entire screen. The answer box is so large and dominating of the SERP that users have no ABILITY to click through. Let alone need. Google's actions have absolutely decimated our business. Here's our statement with image examples dating back to 2012: https://medium.com/@brianwarner/celebritynetworths-statement-submitted-to-the-house-subcommittee-on-antitrust-788fff88723f https://medium.com/@brianwarner/celebritynetworths-statement...
• MattyRad 7y ago
  As a reminder, DuckDuckGo (while being an alternative itself) supports bang operators (https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang), which helps to prevent Google assimilation.
• rasz 7y ago
  100% of my searches produced no visible(to google) clicks for over 10 years. var resultLinks = e ? e.querySelectorAll('.r') : document.querySelectorAll('div#search .r'); for (var i = 0; i < resultLinks.length; i++) { var link = resultLinks[i].childNodes[0]; var oldLink = link.href; if (/^(https?:\/\/(www\.|encrypted\.)?google\.[^\/]*)?\/?url/.test(oldLink)) { var matches = /[\?&](url|q)=(.+?)&/.exec(oldLink); if (matches != null) { link.href = unescape(matches[2]); } } // Clear attached event listeners so google can't mangle urls on mouse click if (link.getAttribute('onmousedown')) { link.removeAttribute('onmousedown'); } if (link.ping) link.ping = null;
• tyingq 7y ago
  Not surprised, but the watch out for Google investors is that all the tricks for Google revenue growth to outpace general internet growth are all played out. You can't "add more ads" above the fold when everything above the fold (for lucrative searches) is already an ad. And dropping below 50% of searches don't result in a click is hard. Either for practical or anti-trust reasons. So, get used to growth that's tied to internet growth. Which "ain't so bad", but also "ain't what it used to be". This cow is milked, so if you want to go back to growth that exceeds expectations, you need a new cow. Search monetization has peaked for the near future.
• malicioususer11 7y ago
  "best cheap wino wine local 3am open" :)
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
  It would be great to see a taxonomy of the zero-click searches.
• dpcan 7y ago
  Is this data from browsers infected with Malware like my Mother-and-Father-in-Law's computer where all they do is search "the Google" for recipes or whether a celebrity is dead?
• frogpelt 7y ago
  My M.O. when I do a Google Search: 1. Type some search terms. 2. Look at the first page of results. 3. Fail to find any results that look promising. 4. Repeat. Surely, this accounts for a large chunk of non-click searches?
• calimac 7y ago
  does this mean google has even more influence over the coloring of reality. Are users taking there cursory summaries over source information?
• provolone 7y ago
  Stop writing naive content in meta-description and cards. Use this content as a teaser. Be cynical. Sell your content. Survive. I read this as 50% of web developers failed to open, so they'll never close.
• jammygit 7y ago
  I want to take the opportunity to blame SEO for this. The top results are games so hard that not-rarely the first page is nothing but spammy seo sites now. Depends a lot on what you are searching for though.
• egypturnash 7y ago
  Article: "Throughout this post, I’ll be using numbers from the clickstream data company, Jumpshot. They are, in my opinion, the best, most reliable source of information on what happens inside web browsers because of how they gather, process, and scale their estimates." Me: How do they get this data. This is some pretty thorough data on a site they don't own. Article: "Jumpshot is the data arm of Avast, a well-regarded maker of numerous Internet security products. 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. [...] Article: "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." ...I hate this world. Everyone's tracking you. Everyone's selling you to advertisers.
  • baroffoos 7y ago
    * Every corporation There are still plenty of individuals working on projects not driven by money which respect your privacy.
• JoshMnem 7y ago
  With AMP, signed HTTP exchanges, and "portals" it's getting even worse. Users never leave their servers, and they control the publishing format and require you to include their JavaScript. (It's only briefly mentioned in the article.)
• nitrogen 7y ago
  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.
• twirlock 7y ago
  Google doesn't search for what you ask anymore. It tells you what to search for based on a prompt. Alphabet is the most oppressive entity in the history of the known universe.
• kerng 7y ago
  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.
• djabatt 7y ago
  This is bad news.
• rcarmo 7y ago
  I’ve mostly stopped using Google search due to the amount of sponsored/summarized content on the first page, which either renders my search useless (too many references to generic pieces or reviews rather than actual product pages) or abridged snippets from web sites (that often carry just enough information to be misleading). I use DuckDuckGo, obviously, especially if I need technical information.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• mikekchar 7y ago
  I admit to using google as a spell checker. That is to say that my browser spell checks but doesn't give me suggestions on how to fix it. I would say at least 2/3 of my "searches" are really just spell checking (or small calculations). I guess that's why I get such weird ads :-D
• lordgrenville 7y ago
  Any DDG users notice how it does the same thing with the top StackOverflow answer? From the user's perspective it's fantastic, but I assume it's legally at least a grey area. Considering how aggressively SO is monetising now they'll probably come after them before long. (Of course, DDG's userbase is pretty small, but probably a not insignificant share of developers.)
• carlmr 7y ago
  I like how the HN title corrects the grammar mistake in the original title (less -> fewer).
• melomal 7y ago
  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.
• mirimir 7y ago
  > 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-criminal-dark-web-activities-after-globally-coordinated-operation https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/massive-blow-to-...
• AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  Paid Ad Paid Ad Paid Ad Paid Ad Paid Ad SEO optimized not what I need SEO optimized not what I need SEO optimized not what I need Kinda maybe what I need? <next page>
• novaleaf 7y ago
  Funny, the article says a CTR of 4.42% is average. Yet my 5% CTR for my own domain name, Google Adwords charges me upwards of $0.50/click, and says I'm penalized (higher cost) because of low engagement. This is for keywords with no competition, which makes me a bit bitter because I have a substantial negative ROI. I can understand that Google wants to prevent arbitrage spam, but I just last week decided to cut my adwords spend to almost nothing because it's not getting better over time.
• t0ughcritic 7y ago
  Aren’t google searches just ads anyway?
• k_bx 7y ago
  It was me using it as a calculator.