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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 cr

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...
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Thus allowing your competitor to take your place
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  wanna take bets google then deranks you heavily?
- pwinnski 7y ago
  It's hard for me to shake the vague feeling that this feels like someone setting up on the sidewalk in front of your property and saying hey, you could have done X, Y, or Z, to stop me from being here. And you say, I did do X. And they say, oh, X was two years ago. Y was last year. Now you have to do Z. Until next year when it'll be AA. And weirdly, AA is the exact opposite of X, because what you thought would take care of things two years ago now penalizes you. It's not a perfect analogy, because obviously people still hope for referrals from Google. But this idea that because something is published somewhere, it's okay, reminds me of Arthur Dent finding out that the notification about demolishing his house was in the third-subbasement of a local government building in a file cabinet marked "Beware of the Leopard." From rough memory; please forgive if I mis-remembered.
  - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
    Do I get to bill google for all extra traffic I have to send by appending that to the body of my websites in order to prevent them from stealing my intellectual property? Also going forward you have to add this to your site or I will steal anything that isn't nailed down. <meta name=”fuzzz4lyfe” content=”notheft”>
- timbowhite 7y ago
  I deliberately opted out of snippets for TLD List [0], a price comparison site I made for domain names. I don't know if it's made any difference. Organic search traffic from them has slowly but steadily increased over the years. Google now sometimes displays a snippet from my competitor's website for searches like "cheapest .io domain" [1]. The snippet seems pretty useless as it doesn't include any registrars' names/links (and my competitor's price info is quite outdated). In these cases, since the snippet is the 1st thing users see in SERP, and doesn't provide enough info to fully answer the question, I'd wager that my competitor is ultimately receiving the majority of clicks from these snippets. [0] https://tld-list.com https://tld-list.com [1] https://i.imgur.com/aFoZbFw.png https://i.imgur.com/aFoZbFw.png
  - jasode 7y ago
    >I deliberately opted out of snippets Appreciate your datapoint. Also btw, when I "view source" the HTML of tld-list.com, I notice it has "nosnippet" inside a comment:  Does google crawler parse and obey "nosnippet" embedded in HTML comments?
    - timbowhite 7y ago
      No I don't think so. Thanks for pointing that out. IIRC, I eventually removed nosnippet because it caused google to not display microdata in SERP (see the "$25.99 to $99.80" in the above screenshot) that were desirable for my traffic. I instead replaced nosnippet with: ``` <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> ``` And this seemed to have the same effect as nosnippet, but with the added benefit of my microdata still being displayed in SERP.
SilasX 7y ago
Hm, I think there's scumminess on both sides, since (as GP noted) even simple sites (e.g. for lyrics) are bloated and unusable. Before: User: Hey Google, what's the monthly payment on a 20-year mortgage with 3.9% APR? Google: Oh, MortgateSite would know, go there. MortgageSite: Here's your calculator. User: Okay, let me put in the numbers ... awesome, thanks! Oh, neat, they can hook me up with lenders. Let me take a look. MortgageSite: Thanks for the referral, Google! Everyone wins. Today, it's more like: User: Hey Google, what's the monthly payment on a 20-year mortgage with 3.9% APR? Google: Oh, that would be this much: ... . Here are some sites where you can dig deeper. User: Um, okay, might be worth a look. Let's try MortgageSite. MortgageSite: uhhhhhhh hold on a second. Hey, see our BUY THIS PRODUCT mortgage calculator. AND THIS ONE User: Uh, okay, I'll just type in-- MortgageSite: HEY! It looks like you're new to this site. Want to get on our mailing list? User: You know what? Screw it. MortgageSite: Confound you, Google, for stealing our traffic!
- tamersalama 7y ago
  Funny thing that usually "BUY THIS PRODUCT" is also a Google Product (Ad)
- checktheorder 7y ago
  >MortgageSite: HEY! It looks like you're new to this site. Want to get on our mailing list? Dear every web developer in the world who makes no effort to fight your employers' marketing department on this: I hate you.
  - zaat 7y ago
    I'm not related in any way to that scene, but what would you tell to marketing when they tell you that that while the mailing list pupup is obnoxious and annoying, it results in X users enrolling and later on Y of them actually ends being customers?
    - mechamicro 7y ago
      There does seem to be a sizeable number of people who take any request on a webpage as a command, and comply with the email popup. Which would then generate leads. But, this popup harassment is just going to turn away experienced users. Many of whom will be the educated, well-compensated demographic the site most wants to cultivate. And a subset of that group will have the ability to create or edit blockers, which will then be turned against the offending site. Thus making it more difficult for that company to reach the more desirable users. That's what I would tell marketing. That wouldn't work for all companies. Some will be thrilled to get a boatload of inexperienced or naive users. But would be nice if the others would start to get worried about what they're losing with their bounce rate.
sixothree 7y ago
Also the data they are serving is often incorrect or outdated. I've grown accustom to not trusting these info boxes.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I don't trust them either. They seem to pull info out of random places, and you can't easily tell how up-to-date the content is.
- notahacker 7y ago
  Yep. And what's worse is that sometimes the site is correct and/or up to date and the Google snippet attributed to that site isn't or is poorly chosen for the question. Google "chancellor" from the UK and it'll suggest the question "who is the UK chancellor now" which expands to name the previous chancellor (an error Google attributes to gov.uk which would have been updated in July with the new appointment). Click on the link to Google the question and this time the snippet attributed to the same source will be up to date and give you the correct answer. But if I still need to load a new page to get the right answer I'd preferred to go direct to the source page without it serving me wrong answers wrongly attributed first. And the other questions are also a rabbithole of rubbish to fall down (the question "who was the previous chancellor?" answered by "previous chancellors have opted for whisky..." is my favourite combination) or excerpt the wrong part of the page and then encourage you to search Google again to get the same unhelpful excerpt again rather than deign to look at the source period. Getting this stuff right across millions of queries and unstructured data of mixed quality is undoubtedly an incredibly hard technical problem but I think it's probably better to sometimes let users leave Google properties than feed them inaccurate answers inaccurately attributed...
- baroffoos 7y ago
  They also crop the content so even when it is correct you can't see all the steps.
SllX 7y ago
A bait and switch would imply more of an implicit contract than there ever was along the way. In the 90s, people were making websites because they wanted to make websites, and some of them were informational, and some of them were just whatever cool thing somebody decided to publish. Keeping track of your favorite sites was harder, but eventually browsers added bookmarks and it became a bit easier. Okay, now how do you find all of that stuff? Three answers kind of sprung up: sites that are list of sites, directories (Yahoo) and search engines. They kind of work, but finding good stuff is still hard, and while the best answer here is probably search, the indexes aren’t entirely comprehensive and the algorithms aren’t good at sorting good stuff from bad stuff yet, they’re too easily gamed. Google came along and went with search, but they did two things differently: they built a comprehensive index and they had a good algorithm for sorting good stuff from bad stuff. This didn’t stop an entire industry from springing up to try and game it, but they made gaming their algorithm an increasingly expensive proposition, and just doing the right thing easier. So now we have a good search engine with a comprehensive index, now the web has a different problem: as much stuff as there is, it turns out there’s not enough stuff about a lot of stuff, and this is obvious once you have a good enough search engine that will till you whether there is enough stuff about your term. Well as it turns out, it is already 2004 and people are just now figuring out how to make lots and lots of money with this internet and web stuff. Google has come out ahead of the pact as the obviously superior choice for searching all this stuff, their competitors get a lot better, but Google stays ahead of them, and they’re able to maintain a lead by simply being so much better there is no reason to stop using Google so long as they’re not evil. They also figured something else out: people are looking for information, or the tools for getting that information. Who knows more about getting information than peoples whose jobs it is to find and surface the right information? And it turns out that some things you can’t find with just a webpage, you need other kinds of tools, like calculators. So they built them in, because at the end of the day, it’s the information that people actually want, they don’t need the debris that comes along with loading a full webpage. tl;dr Google is an information services company and always has been. Characterizing them as a search engine or advertising company is a massive understatement and was always inaccurate.
- Endy 7y ago
  I miss having a good index site. Yahoo's gone, DMOZ shut down. We need a good human-curated index that's not bound to ad spend or SEO nonsense. I don't want to know about "long-tail keywords", I want to know if the site has good content that serves eithet a need or an interest. Now, if it so happens that websites with valuable content also have SEO valuable, that means the search engine algorithm is optimized correctly. But we need humans.
acdc4life 7y ago
I prefer Googles snippet to visiting a shitty site. This is one of the few instances that I fully support Google. If websites want to stay relevant, they need to be more inventive.
jrochkind1 7y ago
Can a web site simply stop providing the markup for featured snippets?
lallysingh 7y ago
Are you arguing that Google violates copyright?
didibus 7y ago
Not from a user search perspective. That's an awesome search feature. And for all the website that aren't trying to monetize, like my personal blog, or wikipedia, it also isn't a problem, and a great feature to have, which might be argued serves the greater good and improves the internet by making finding free flow of information easier. I think we need to go back a little and think. When the internet started, if you wanted to monetize your website, and attract users, what would you do? There were no search engines. Nowadays, people claim they're at the mercy of Google, but it's more that their very existence and business model was enabled and made viable by Google. Since it seems, without Google, no one would find them and visit their website. In that sense, I find it hard to say Google is taking things away, it seems more like Google is giving and giving, sometimes, it gives less, and sometimes it gives more.
t0ughcritic 7y ago
Facebook did this with pages

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...

C1sc0cat 7y ago
Thus allowing your competitor to take your place
throwaway2048 7y ago
wanna take bets google then deranks you heavily?
pwinnski 7y ago
It's hard for me to shake the vague feeling that this feels like someone setting up on the sidewalk in front of your property and saying hey, you could have done X, Y, or Z, to stop me from being here. And you say, I did do X. And they say, oh, X was two years ago. Y was last year. Now you have to do Z. Until next year when it'll be AA. And weirdly, AA is the exact opposite of X, because what you thought would take care of things two years ago now penalizes you. It's not a perfect analogy, because obviously people still hope for referrals from Google. But this idea that because something is published somewhere, it's okay, reminds me of Arthur Dent finding out that the notification about demolishing his house was in the third-subbasement of a local government building in a file cabinet marked "Beware of the Leopard." From rough memory; please forgive if I mis-remembered.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  Do I get to bill google for all extra traffic I have to send by appending that to the body of my websites in order to prevent them from stealing my intellectual property? Also going forward you have to add this to your site or I will steal anything that isn't nailed down. <meta name=”fuzzz4lyfe” content=”notheft”>
timbowhite 7y ago
I deliberately opted out of snippets for TLD List [0], a price comparison site I made for domain names. I don't know if it's made any difference. Organic search traffic from them has slowly but steadily increased over the years. Google now sometimes displays a snippet from my competitor's website for searches like "cheapest .io domain" [1]. The snippet seems pretty useless as it doesn't include any registrars' names/links (and my competitor's price info is quite outdated). In these cases, since the snippet is the 1st thing users see in SERP, and doesn't provide enough info to fully answer the question, I'd wager that my competitor is ultimately receiving the majority of clicks from these snippets. [0] https://tld-list.com https://tld-list.com [1] https://i.imgur.com/aFoZbFw.png https://i.imgur.com/aFoZbFw.png
- jasode 7y ago
  >I deliberately opted out of snippets Appreciate your datapoint. Also btw, when I "view source" the HTML of tld-list.com, I notice it has "nosnippet" inside a comment:  Does google crawler parse and obey "nosnippet" embedded in HTML comments?
  - timbowhite 7y ago
    No I don't think so. Thanks for pointing that out. IIRC, I eventually removed nosnippet because it caused google to not display microdata in SERP (see the "$25.99 to $99.80" in the above screenshot) that were desirable for my traffic. I instead replaced nosnippet with: ``` <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> ``` And this seemed to have the same effect as nosnippet, but with the added benefit of my microdata still being displayed in SERP.

SilasX 7y ago

Hm, I think there's scumminess on both sides, since (as GP noted) even simple sites (e.g. for lyrics) are bloated and unusable. Before: User: Hey Google, what's the monthly payment on a 20-year mortgage with 3.9% APR? Google: Oh, MortgateSite would know, go there. MortgageSite: Here's your calculator. User: Okay, let me put in the numbers ... awesome, thanks! Oh, neat, they can hook me up with lenders. Let me take a look. MortgageSite: Thanks for the referral, Google! Everyone wins. Today, it's more like: User: Hey Google, what's the monthly payment on a 20-year mortgage with 3.9% APR? Google: Oh, that would be this much: ... . Here are some sites where you can dig deeper. User: Um, okay, might be worth a look. Let's try MortgageSite. MortgageSite: uhhhhhhh hold on a second. Hey, see our BUY THIS PRODUCT mortgage calculator. AND THIS ONE User: Uh, okay, I'll just type in-- MortgageSite: HEY! It looks like you're new to this site. Want to get on our mailing list? User: You know what? Screw it. MortgageSite: Confound you, Google, for stealing our traffic!

tamersalama 7y ago
Funny thing that usually "BUY THIS PRODUCT" is also a Google Product (Ad)
checktheorder 7y ago
>MortgageSite: HEY! It looks like you're new to this site. Want to get on our mailing list? Dear every web developer in the world who makes no effort to fight your employers' marketing department on this: I hate you.
- zaat 7y ago
  I'm not related in any way to that scene, but what would you tell to marketing when they tell you that that while the mailing list pupup is obnoxious and annoying, it results in X users enrolling and later on Y of them actually ends being customers?
  - mechamicro 7y ago
    There does seem to be a sizeable number of people who take any request on a webpage as a command, and comply with the email popup. Which would then generate leads. But, this popup harassment is just going to turn away experienced users. Many of whom will be the educated, well-compensated demographic the site most wants to cultivate. And a subset of that group will have the ability to create or edit blockers, which will then be turned against the offending site. Thus making it more difficult for that company to reach the more desirable users. That's what I would tell marketing. That wouldn't work for all companies. Some will be thrilled to get a boatload of inexperienced or naive users. But would be nice if the others would start to get worried about what they're losing with their bounce rate.

sixothree 7y ago

Also the data they are serving is often incorrect or outdated. I've grown accustom to not trusting these info boxes.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I don't trust them either. They seem to pull info out of random places, and you can't easily tell how up-to-date the content is.
notahacker 7y ago
Yep. And what's worse is that sometimes the site is correct and/or up to date and the Google snippet attributed to that site isn't or is poorly chosen for the question. Google "chancellor" from the UK and it'll suggest the question "who is the UK chancellor now" which expands to name the previous chancellor (an error Google attributes to gov.uk which would have been updated in July with the new appointment). Click on the link to Google the question and this time the snippet attributed to the same source will be up to date and give you the correct answer. But if I still need to load a new page to get the right answer I'd preferred to go direct to the source page without it serving me wrong answers wrongly attributed first. And the other questions are also a rabbithole of rubbish to fall down (the question "who was the previous chancellor?" answered by "previous chancellors have opted for whisky..." is my favourite combination) or excerpt the wrong part of the page and then encourage you to search Google again to get the same unhelpful excerpt again rather than deign to look at the source period. Getting this stuff right across millions of queries and unstructured data of mixed quality is undoubtedly an incredibly hard technical problem but I think it's probably better to sometimes let users leave Google properties than feed them inaccurate answers inaccurately attributed...
baroffoos 7y ago
They also crop the content so even when it is correct you can't see all the steps.

SllX 7y ago

A bait and switch would imply more of an implicit contract than there ever was along the way. In the 90s, people were making websites because they wanted to make websites, and some of them were informational, and some of them were just whatever cool thing somebody decided to publish. Keeping track of your favorite sites was harder, but eventually browsers added bookmarks and it became a bit easier. Okay, now how do you find all of that stuff? Three answers kind of sprung up: sites that are list of sites, directories (Yahoo) and search engines. They kind of work, but finding good stuff is still hard, and while the best answer here is probably search, the indexes aren’t entirely comprehensive and the algorithms aren’t good at sorting good stuff from bad stuff yet, they’re too easily gamed. Google came along and went with search, but they did two things differently: they built a comprehensive index and they had a good algorithm for sorting good stuff from bad stuff. This didn’t stop an entire industry from springing up to try and game it, but they made gaming their algorithm an increasingly expensive proposition, and just doing the right thing easier. So now we have a good search engine with a comprehensive index, now the web has a different problem: as much stuff as there is, it turns out there’s not enough stuff about a lot of stuff, and this is obvious once you have a good enough search engine that will till you whether there is enough stuff about your term. Well as it turns out, it is already 2004 and people are just now figuring out how to make lots and lots of money with this internet and web stuff. Google has come out ahead of the pact as the obviously superior choice for searching all this stuff, their competitors get a lot better, but Google stays ahead of them, and they’re able to maintain a lead by simply being so much better there is no reason to stop using Google so long as they’re not evil. They also figured something else out: people are looking for information, or the tools for getting that information. Who knows more about getting information than peoples whose jobs it is to find and surface the right information? And it turns out that some things you can’t find with just a webpage, you need other kinds of tools, like calculators. So they built them in, because at the end of the day, it’s the information that people actually want, they don’t need the debris that comes along with loading a full webpage. tl;dr Google is an information services company and always has been. Characterizing them as a search engine or advertising company is a massive understatement and was always inaccurate.

Endy 7y ago
I miss having a good index site. Yahoo's gone, DMOZ shut down. We need a good human-curated index that's not bound to ad spend or SEO nonsense. I don't want to know about "long-tail keywords", I want to know if the site has good content that serves eithet a need or an interest. Now, if it so happens that websites with valuable content also have SEO valuable, that means the search engine algorithm is optimized correctly. But we need humans.

acdc4life 7y ago

I prefer Googles snippet to visiting a shitty site. This is one of the few instances that I fully support Google. If websites want to stay relevant, they need to be more inventive.

jrochkind1 7y ago

Can a web site simply stop providing the markup for featured snippets?

lallysingh 7y ago

Are you arguing that Google violates copyright?

didibus 7y ago

Not from a user search perspective. That's an awesome search feature. And for all the website that aren't trying to monetize, like my personal blog, or wikipedia, it also isn't a problem, and a great feature to have, which might be argued serves the greater good and improves the internet by making finding free flow of information easier. I think we need to go back a little and think. When the internet started, if you wanted to monetize your website, and attract users, what would you do? There were no search engines. Nowadays, people claim they're at the mercy of Google, but it's more that their very existence and business model was enabled and made viable by Google. Since it seems, without Google, no one would find them and visit their website. In that sense, I find it hard to say Google is taking things away, it seems more like Google is giving and giving, sometimes, it gives less, and sometimes it gives more.

t0ughcritic 7y ago

Facebook did this with pages