14 ms·
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
by 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 agoOn 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 agoFor 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 agoPeople on the web take the risk of being misinformed, clicking or not.
- concert-gilled 7y agoThe websites that the results aren't curated either. Clicking through to the site could provide the same incorrect information.
- buboard 7y agosometimes the blurb just has an answer to a different question. Websites are curated, unless its spam.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Websites are curated, unless its spam. Yes, but even when they are curated the curators are usually unreliable and sometimes malicious.
- buboard 7y agosnippets are just a reflection of that. how is google faring better in that respect?
- mcv 7y agoBut that's the responsibility of that website. Of course it's bad if Google lists a site with wrong information as the first hit, but I think it's worse when Google blindly copies that false info and lists it as their own zero-click result. By doing that, Google itself takes responsibility for the information. Although sometimes the site is actually correct and Google still gets it wrong by copying the info incorrectly or losing some context or qualifiers. I loved zero-click results back when DucfDuckGo first introduced them, but I'm less enthusiastic about Google's implementation of them.
- perl4ever 7y agoThe point is that Google frequently adds another level of incorrectness, that may not be identifiable without checking the source. This is pretty common on Wikipedia, and when people link to things in discussion forums, as well. And anything Google does, is done at vast scale, which makes me, at least, think it might be substantially affecting society.
- wolco 7y agoThose are sites google chooses are correct.
- squeaky-clean 7y agoI've found them to be incorrect so often on things when I would click through to the actual page or find a better link. I don't trust just the blurb for any answers any more.
- ribosometronome 7y agoThey can get it painfully wrong last time. I came down with something like optic neuritis a few years ago. It's often one of the first signs of MS in many folk. When I googled something like "MS life expectancy", the blurb said something like "3-7 years" -- with subtext indicating it's 3-7 years LESS than average rather than "you're kicking it in 3 years". Turns out I didn't have optic neuritis.
- mtgx 7y agoLet's hope Google doesn't intend to enable the feature for the 2020 elections (or any election), because this one thing could single-handedly do to Google PR-wise and politics-wise what the trending topics did to Facebook in 2016/2017.
- reaperducer 7y agoI don't trust just the blurb for any answers any more. I don't, either. A site I used to own had a discussion forum on it. It contained a message along the lines of "Real Estate Agent X is a great guy. Real Estate Agent Y is a complete sleazebag." The blurb that Google displayed for it was "Real Estate Agent X... is a sleazebag." And that was the first result for anyone who searched for that agent's name. As you can imagine, I received many angry e-mails, phone calls, and legal threats. No, you can't explain to angry people that it's "just" an algorithm that told the world that they're a sleazebag. I ended up editing the post so that Google would display a different version after its next scrape.
- londons_explore 7y agoI think there's more to this... Google use lots of fancy Natural Language Processing stuff to extract that data, and unless the wording was very tortuous, I doubt it could make such a big mistake by chance.
- rhizome 7y agoThis is especially true where the answer is time-bound, which happens a lot in technical topics. Many times the snippet is for an earlier version of the language (but still with a high PageRank), or the Operating System (especially Android settings), and the most annoying at all: an ancient answer in an undated blog post.
- londons_explore 7y agoGoogle is good at dating undated content. They keep track of the first time they've ever seen a bit of text, and assume it was composed then, even if it later gets copied to other sites.
- sameers 7y agoFor example, this WaPo story, about YouTube videos for some medical queries that go to videos featuring quack remedies and anti-vaxxer misinformation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/they-turn-to-facebook-and-youtube-to-find-a-cure-for-cancer--and-get-sucked-into-a-world-of-bogus-medicine/2019/06/25/6df3ddae-7cdc-11e9-a5b3-34f3edf1351e_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/they-turn-to-...
- dragonwriter 7y ago> On top of all that, Google's snippets aren't curated and therefore, aren't always correct. The “therefore” is misplaced; curated snippets aren't always correct, either.
- amelius 7y agoShouldn't they be liable for mis-information? Wouldn't that solve the entire problem?
- mikeg8 7y agoI don’t see any way to actually achieve this at scale let alone any reason to add an opening for more pointless lawsuits. Let’s say they’re liable and you choose to act on incorrect information recieved for free. Do you really try to take them to court and on what grounds?
- goatinaboat 7y agoYes, Google and similar companies should be 100% responsible for anything published on their platforms. No more “safe harbour”. They have chosen to take positions in many issues, that makes them more like newspapers than phone companies.
- root_axis 7y agoThey're not like either. If anything they're like a phone book for URLs instead of phone numbers.
- goatinaboat 7y agoExcept this is a phone book that sorts not alphabetically (no pun intended) but according to its own interests. No phone company ever did that.
- root_axis 7y agoOf course it doesn't sort the internet alphabetically, that'd make no sense and be a bad user experience as well as optimize for URLS starting with A.
- goatinaboat 7y agoI don’t mean literally alphabetically but according to some objective measures. In the old days it was by incoming links (PageRank). But now it is opaque and many people are finding that it orders by whatever is best for Google, not for the user.
- OrgNet 7y agothat is correct and should be considered copyright infringement... I am so tired of the double standard in the US of people VS corporations... Corporations are considered better people then real people.
- buboard 7y agoFunny to read in the html: - This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO - This site is optimized with the Schema plugin Yeah, optimized to death
- charlesju 7y agoIt's important to note that this is strategically incredibly important for Google because this forms the backbone of their voice AI. The better at answering questions directly, the better their voice AI becomes and that leads to a lot of future products.
- soup10 7y agoAdWords is and always has been the goose that lays the golden eggs, none of Google's other initiatives have ever rivaled that revenue. That's why they put so much effort into bolstering and optimizing their search results pages.
- HenryBemis 7y agoAnother reason is the use of add-ons such as: "Google search link fix - Prevents Google and Yandex search pages from modifying search result links when you click them." I have stopped using Google a few years ago, but just in case I keep this (or similar) add-ons of my Firefox. I have no idea of the popularity of such addons, but they would also impact the tracking that Google does.
- TheArcane 7y agoI consider myself privacy conscious and have add-ons like muli-account containers, cookie auto-delete, UB Origin and Privacy Badger working in tandem. It's embarrassing that I wasn't aware of this extension, given how useful it seems - thanks!
- IGotThroughIt 7y agoHow safe are all these plugins we install to escape tracking? Are we trying to escape big tech tracking only to hand our information over to extension developers? Looking at network traffic often shows a ton of extensions sending data to some aws server almost perpetually. Asking because I'm not sure of the answer to this question and lately I've become even warier so I decided to uninstall everything except things I absolutely must have like colorzilla, grammarly and full-page screen capture. For adblocking I use brave and never ever touch firefox, opera or chrome. There's an extension that appends a share=1 parameter to all quora links to prevent them from forcing you to sign in in order to view a post. I like it but I'm trying to minimize my extensions footprint and I'd rather write my own script to perform the same script. The question is, how do you get to be sure that an extension is safe?
- ineedasername 7y agoGlad the first ranked response was this. It's what I came here to say. These days you simply don't need to click as often to get what you need out of a search, and Google's business model doesn't rely on click through to web sites, but for display & click through of ads.
- milesskorpen 7y agoThis is good for users ... for now. But as Google sucks up the consumer surplus, it's going to be harder and harder to make money from internet businesses, and the final result a few years down the road will be toxic. The internet isn't going to work too well if its solely reliant on hobbyists.
- wolco 7y agoThey could but the hobbists sites are no longer in the serps.
- scohesc 7y agoSo they're like a modern ebaums world for the information age. Interesting way to put it - the biggest bully with the most money wins!
- reaperducer 7y agoNo, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results. It's for this reason that's I've stopped embedding micro data in the HTML I write. Micro data only serves Google. Not my clients. Not my sites. Just Google. Every month or so I get an e-mail from a Google bot warning me that my site's micro data is incomplete. Tough. If Google wants to use my content, then Google can pay me. If Google wants to go back to being a search engine instead of a content thief and aggregator, then I'm on board.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- henryfjordan 7y agoI 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 "high quality". I think I've gotten exactly 0 clicks from Google search results ever and I don't really ever want any. If it were possible to get a human's attention at Google I'd start sending my own criticism their way but of course it doesn't work like that...
- grogenaut 7y agoYeah it's amazing how rapidly and rabidly they show up when the complaint is on one of their paid features like a Google cloud (GCE) post for them or a competitor, but nada on the other products. Well no it's actually not surprising.
- londons_explore 7y agoGoogle cloud employees are encouraged to go on social media to get a feel for issues users are having and to make the product better. The rest of Google has a policy of "Engineers will probably say the wrong thing if we let them talk in public"
- aviraldg 7y agoFeel free to add them to your robots.txt; they won't scrape you then (but they won't index or rank you either)
- mrtksn 7y agoIf I recall correctly content(news especially) publishers and some Europeans were very angry about that. I think the consensus was that these businesses don't understand the internet.
- gniv 7y agoI disagree. There is an implicit contract between website publishers and search engines that it’s ok to do this. The website can set nosnippet in robots if they want to not have the snippet in search results.
- milesskorpen 7y agoIt's a faustian bargin. Google is so powerful you can't do without them, but they're also inexorably eating your future.
- Silhouette 7y agoGoogle is so powerful you can't do without them I wonder how true that assumption really is any more. The quality of traffic Google drives to sites I operate is very low compared to all other major sources, with much less engagement by any metric you like, notably including conversions. The only reliable exception is when we're running marketing campaigns in other places, which often result in spikes in both direct visitors landing on our homepage and search engine visitors arriving at our general landing pages. There is this conventional wisdom that SEO, and in particular playing by Google's rules to rank highly in its results pages, is the only way you can run a viable commercial site these days. Our experience has been exactly the opposite: our SEO is actually quite effective, in that we do rank very highly for many relevant search terms, but it makes a relatively small contribution to anything that matters. And really, when I write "SEO" here, I'm only talking about general good practices like being fast, having a good information architecture and working well on different devices. We don't change the structure of our pages just because Google's latest blog post says X or Y is now considered a "best practice" or anything like that. Of course I have no way to know how representative our experience is. YMMV.
- milesskorpen 7y agoIt is a very significant part of our business.
- scarface74 7y agoYes you can. There are other ways to market yourself and your website. For instance, the author of “Fearless Negotiation” has appeared in four or five podcasts I follow. The well known pundits in the Apple ecosystem grew an audience organically through word of mouth. Hoping to stand out on Google results as a business plan is recipe for failure. You are one algorithm change from going out of business.
- autokad 7y agoI 0 click search more than I click because but not limited to: 1 ) to get the correct spelling of a word that spell check cant find a suggestion 2 ) avoid going to a site that I might potentially get malware (example searching music lyrics) 3 ) avoid having to deal with slow loading and bloated pages
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- philipov 7y agoI think "hypocritical" is a more appropriate description than "Ironic"
- bartimus 7y agoI'm still on the fence somewhat. Searching for "best car engine oil" has certain brands displayed straight on the featured snippet. Who cares about the click if Google found your customer for you and got your message through for free?
- tremon 7y agoIn the end, Google should care. If a search for "best car engine oil" got your product featured, that means you won a sale. But assuming the sale happens completely offline, Google lost its opportunity to inform you of the search, and of the succesful search->sale conversion. That means your marketing department can no longer justify investing money in Google SEO, which means less optimization towards Google's crawler, which means less reliable search results, which means less Google searches in the long run.
- bartimus 7y agoIncreased profits from unknown sources VS decreased profits from known sources. The gained marketing intelligence may come at the cost of the bottom line.
- megaremote 7y agoThe funny thing is this used to happen. In the early days, you ask a simple question, you would get the answer in the search results, before they introduced feature snippets. The problem was, because no one was clicking on these useful sites, they were downgraded in the listings to sites that hid the useful info so you had to click on it.
- singlow 7y agoI actually searched for best nail for cedar this afternoon :-P. I clicked several of the articles though...
- mxd3 7y agoGreat point, this was my first thought also. Google has been doing a slow creep of this type of content for the past through years through the featured snippet you mentioned, and other knowledge panel material. They now serve sports, weather, math, translation, flights, etc.
- ses1984 7y agoDoes it matter if they have a policy against scraping? I thought that was explicitly legal, which enables their existence.
- arcturus17 7y ago> Google has a policy against scraping their results, but their whole business model is predicated off scraping other sites and making money off the content Yea a couple days ago I was checking the Places API, which they’ve built off user-generated content and scraping Yelp and others. They charge $17 / 1000 calls for certain items and don’t you dare cache anything for too long. Great way to build a business: get data for free, wall it off and put a hefty price tag on it, then put your best lawyers around the moat for good measure!
- londons_explore 7y agoI downloaded all the places data for the world while it was still free. In my jurisdiction, the data is considered owned by the place owners rather than Google, so I doubt they'll come after me.
- sverige 7y agoThat's the ancestry.com business model as well.
- epiphanitus 7y agoSpeaking of scraping, does anyone know where one can get a hold of full text news articles/press releases for nlp research? Most APIs that I have found only offer partial texts. I know that Aylien has an API for this but it's out of my price range.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- johnx123-up 7y agoAs I mentioned before in HN, this guy predicted "Google SEO bubble" http://rajeshanbiah.blogspot.com/2018/01/technology-prediction-for-2018.html http://rajeshanbiah.blogspot.com/2018/01/technology-predicti...
- Illniyar 7y ago"• Google earns more ad revenue as users stick around on Google longer" This one is actually reverse. Google search doesn't net google any money if people don't actually click the link, since ad revenue for google search is Per Click, not per view (per mille). The incentives for them are actually reversed - increasing the amount of clicks into external websites, specifically advertised links, increases their revenue. (which is why there are so many advertised links on a search page)
- tylerl 7y agoHold on. Google doesn't earn even a penny when you visit their site, find your answer on the search results page, and then leave. That user behavior COSTS Google money, it doesn't earn anything. If they were trying to monetize you they'd show you an ad that links to your answer and take a profit on the click. Directly giving the user the answer they want is great for the user, but guarantees that Google won't earn any revenue. So why does Google do it? Simple: because their competitors do. That's the free market for you. Google didn't start that feature, another competitor did; Microsoft made it their primary differentiating feature in fact (remember the "bing and decide" ads?). Google had to adopt the same behavior or lose their customers. So no, don't blame Google, blame capitalism. This is precisely the kind of feature that you wouldn't get if Google was able to behave as a monopoly.
- dplgk 7y agoWhy is this is not copyright infringement?
- tabtab 7y agoI do a fair amount of grammar and spelling searches. Google often displays tips and examples. And typing "sp500" displays a stock chart right in Google itself. Google has a lot of "instant snippets" like that. Quite convenient. However, near-monopolies do make me nervous about supporting them.