25 ms·

Google Search is only 18% Search

231 points by jitbit 14y ago

jiggy2011 14y ago
Question for people more familiar with google ads that me: I quite often type in a search term for something that I imagine must be a very common search term and I don't get any adverts whatsoever. Does this mean that nobody has bid on this keyword (because it's too expensive?) or are some search terms simply not allowed to be advertised on?
- jaredmck 14y ago
  Some terms don't display advertisements - if the combination of relevance and google's profit potential on a specific query is not above a certain level (which is always changing I'm sure based on yield management and user data tests), then no ads will display for that query. Most navigational queries fall into this class.
- tiziano88 14y ago
  By definition if no one has bid on the keyword, you can easily win the auction by bidding the minimum amount. It is likely that the terms you were searching for are not ideal targets for effective ads. Can you give an example of such query?
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    I can't remember which terms I searched when I discovered this, but I tried it just now. "computer networking" yields 1 ad. "networking" yields no ads.
seanconaty 14y ago
To be fair you should factor whitespace out when you're calculating the area. In the recent screen capture all the whitespace is added to the non-search results. In the not-so-recent results there is a fair amount of whitespace added to the search results (as well as non-search).
- jitbit 14y ago
  I honestly thought about cutting all the white space completely, but then after having a chat with our designer... He said that every page is visually divided into blocks (even if there are no explicit visual borders of these blocks), subjectively, of course. This, the "F-pattern" and "left-to-right" orientation for the most of us brought us to an agreement that the last screen was ok... The subjective "blocks" are somewhat like this. But I agree, I shouldve been more precise
  - seanconaty 14y ago
    That makes some sense; sort of defining what the whitespace is "devoted" to.
- condiment 14y ago
  I noticed this as well. The older search results have the same width as the new results. It's also interesting to note that the old results page is displaying multiple results for single domains using result nesting, while the new results page displays only one listing for each domain. The end result is that the same number of 'effective search results' are displayed on the page for both versions. The gradual transformation of white space into content is a natural evolution in the life of any web product. While the feature set is simple, the design can be sparse. Mature products benefit from rich feature sets, with the drawback of having to sacrifice the sparse visual design that may have initially distinguished them from the competition.
slaven 14y ago
Aaron Wall has documented the decline of organic search very well over the years. Worth checking out: http://www.seobook.com/the-sales-engine http://www.seobook.com/the-sales-engine
deleted 14y ago
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state 14y ago
This seems to me to be a similar kind of evaluation that Google would do on its own work. Nice angle.
deleted 14y ago
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WestCoastJustin 14y ago
I've been using Adblock+ for the last 6+ years. Granted the 13.8m users [1] are a drop in the bucket compared to googles non Adblock+ viewers. I was a little shocked to see this post as it is much different than what I see. For the search "saas help desk" (https://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=saas+help+desk https://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=saas+help+desk) I see: http://imgur.com/xMB6t http://imgur.com/xMB6t They see: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Vq-qWuUPZE/UER9ChRkKQI/AAAAAAAAAdU/KAojWeHbhpc/s400/serp2.gif http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Vq-qWuUPZE/UER9ChRkKQI/AAAAAAAAAd... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
- shawndumas 14y ago
  wow -- just installed Adblock+. the experience was a lot like finally progressing far enough in my career to not have to wear a tie; i feel freed from bondage...
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
  They are being good guys about it; they could easily block all "Ad-Blockers" and ask you to disable the adblocker to continue (as some sites already do).
  - mike-cardwell 14y ago
    You underestimate the ingenuity of geeks. If Google decided to prevent people from using Ad-blockers, 24 hours later a new Ad-blocker would be released to get around it, or the existing ones would be updated.
    - Danieru 14y ago
      Except such an arms race is highly asymmetric in Google's favour. Google can have a team of 10 working full time racing Ad-Blocker's volunteers. Google can ask for ever more aggressive permissions from web masters, Ad-Blockers must play nice with browsers' plugin api. Google can hire away the most productive Ad-Blocker developers. Google can ban ad-blockers from chrome's plugin repository and halve the ad-blocker userbase overnight. Google has the warchest for a multi year engagement. Most plugin authors cannot last a single year fighting full time. If Google went total war then ad-blockers would disappear within a year. It would be a massive PR hit, maybe even a legal issue. The risks make it all a numbers game, but there does exist a point where Google can no longer ignore ad-blockers. Thus ad-block users must be careful and not become too numerous.
perfunctory 14y ago
bing seems to be doing better in this regard.
- barista 14y ago
  ok granted it is doing better by allocating more space to the search results. But how about the search result quality? How's it doing there?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
stcredzero 14y ago
> Is Google becoming a Yahoo? I suspect that all ad-revenue sites are subject to the same economic pressures. Almost all such companies eventually succumb to these pressures. All such companies will tend to cater to the lowest common denominator. They will tend to put their own interests (that of showing ads and increasing ad effectiveness) over the interests of users. Perhaps there is an opportunity for a paid integrated search/email/calendar/reminders/maps/events application? You pay them $5 or $10 per month, and they do their best to create the best possible experience for you. Apple and Microsoft are well positioned to become this company as well, as is Google. Wouldn't it be ironic if Yahoo! became this company?
- codeka 14y ago
  > Perhaps there is an opportunity for a paid integrated search/email/calendar/reminders/maps/events application? You pay them $5 or $10 per month, and they do their best to create the best possible experience for you. You've just described Google Apps for Business (well, except for search).
- tedunangst 14y ago
  The failure of A/B testing. More ads => more revenue. People won't abandon the site immediately just because a new ad or two showed up, like a slow boiling pot, so short term effects are always positive.
  - asr 14y ago
    Just like the sesame-seed hamburger bun: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/11.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/11.html (Though, personally, in this case, I don't think Google's getting enough credit. The added space for search tools is designed to make search better for most users, and probably do, even if most of us don't need them.)
mmackh 14y ago
I've had trouble staying focused when using Google a while back and decided to write a Chrome extension for improving the Google Search experience. Here's the URL for those interested: http://restfulpanda.com/post/25658805059/cleaning-google http://restfulpanda.com/post/25658805059/cleaning-google EDIT: Turns this: http://f.cl.ly/items/2y1F0d2d0a2K3L1n0Q2m/1.png http://f.cl.ly/items/2y1F0d2d0a2K3L1n0Q2m/1.png Into this: http://f.cl.ly/items/2P3B2c0X0V0Q3U0h3e3A/2.png http://f.cl.ly/items/2P3B2c0X0V0Q3U0h3e3A/2.png
- mistercow 14y ago
  A big improvement, but as with ad blockers, you still have search results crammed into a fairly narrow box. Obviously, you won't be able to get Google to show longer titles and descriptions, but you should be able to widen the box so that the two-line descriptions end up on one line, which would fit more results on each page.
- mattmanser 14y ago
  I just wish you could get it to expand rightwards and get the longer descriptions back, the amount of space they've wasted to 'integrate' G+ really annoys me.
kevinburke 14y ago
This observation made the rounds at Google a few months ago. Note also it depends on the topic of your search. 3 ads in the yellow box are reserved for highly monetized queries - "flowers" or "car insurance" for example. Queries about programming topics - "sinatra post parameters" is one I tried a few minutes ago - usually don't have ads.
- barista 14y ago
  are the "highly monetized queries" queries also the most common queries?
  - sharkweek 14y ago
    They can be -- but not necessarily. It has a lot to do with conversions. Someone searching "car insurance" or "cheap flights" is most likely on the hunt for something they are willing to pay for; while someone searching "football scores" is most likely just looking for free information. Of course this doesn't even scratch the surface of running a site for ad revenue that provides free information to common search questions, e.g., "how do I change the oil in my car"
    - ececconi 14y ago
      Wow I just searched NCAA rankings and saw no ads.
    - kevinburke 14y ago
      Ads are actually more likely to provide the answer to your question, or the solution to your task, when you're searching for something to buy. Which may weigh into why Google puts so many of them on the page.
      - vidarh 14y ago
        It's one of the things that prevents me from ad-blocking sites like Google. Some of the time I will actively be searching for the ads, and avoid the natural results, because the natural results for some product searches can be extremely spammy with "review" sites and comparison shopping sites with horrible user experiences dominating the results, while the paid results are usually decent retailers or distributors.
polyfractal 14y ago
Not to be a shill for Duck Duck Go, but the amount of search information displayed is refreshingly dense: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=saas+help+desk https://duckduckgo.com/?q=saas+help+desk https://duckduckgo.com/?q=travel https://duckduckgo.com/?q=travel
- WestCoastJustin 14y ago
  First time I have seen mapquest used anywhere other than mapquest.com.
- limejuice 14y ago
  I made duckduckgo.com my home page several months ago after I saw http://donttrack.us/ http://donttrack.us/, and it has been working fine. The presentation is nicer than google. I have AdBlock enabled, so I don't see the ads on either site. I like the infinite scroll on duckduckgo; I have AutoPager plugin on chrome to get something similar with google.
- lawdawg 14y ago
  http://www.google.com/search?q=saas+help+desk http://www.google.com/search?q=saas+help+desk How is DDG any better really?
  - polyfractal 14y ago
    I'm not bombarded by fifteen different ads, who are all trying to pretend like search results? The results are hit or miss...I probably !g about half my queries. But the other half are entirely pleasant experiences and I'm hopeful DDG continues to get better.
    - enneff 14y ago
      The ads on the Google result page are probably better links than most of the organic results. People who pay for traffic usually make the payoff worthwhile.
      - 14y ago
mistercow 14y ago
At first I thought "well, if you're using an ad blocker, it's different", but in Google's case, you just end up with white space instead of ads because the search results are still crammed into a 42em wide box. I wonder if there's a user script or chrome plugin to fix that.
fear91 14y ago
Some results are even worse. There were keywords where you could see only 7 organic results. The rest was AdWords. To make things worse, Google adds more and more "product search" results (paid placement). With each day, there's less and less traffic for those people who don't pay Google. I suspect that the paid placement trend will increase until it is possible. To make things worse, Google not only decreases the SERP "real estate". They also introduce frequent algorithm updates which tend to drop down websites which earn on search-engine traffic. Leaving those which may have lesser quality but don't earn on their traffic ( no monetization ). And if you do it to a million websites, you will gain quite a lot of new AdWords buyers. Some of them have to try your PPC ads. Let's say that 10% of them will try to get traffic out of PPC - now you've got yourself 100.000 paying customers. It's obvious they want to force people both to buy and to click ads. They don't gain anything by sending free traffic to other affiliate websites ( which will then convert to sales/leads ). The question is: Where do you draw a line between a search engine and an "ad engine"? To many people, especially those less tech-savy, Google = Internet. I personally think, it's pretty bad for the overall state of e-economy to have this one big mogul who administers the majority of targetted traffic. He wants his share of the pie from everyone. If you are too small to pay, fuck you. They don't need you. The consumer won't notice you are not in the search results, there are 50 other websites happy to take your place. Either you are at the top or you don't exist. It'd be great if there would be something like Google but with a more "socialistic" approach. Instead of having a few websites occupying the top place, provide the traffic to other, smaller players. So the e-economy can expand more.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  > Instead of having a few websites occupying the top place, provide the traffic to other, smaller players. So the e-economy can expand more. How would you do that? Throw in some random numbers to shuffle the search results?
sologoub 14y ago
In the image where you show the 18.5% organic footprint vs 81.5% ad footprint, you are lumping in a lot of page real estate used for navigation and search tools. The entire left hand side is not add related. I'd be a more accurate/fairer way to represent the info by providing 3 categories: organic, ads, navigation/misc. If you did this, you'd provably see a closer to 40/60 split, still in favor of ads. Similar to what you showed in your screenshot from the past.
- devcpp 14y ago
  I looked for "81" in the page and found nothing. Apparently, he never said that 81.5% of the area is made up of ads. He may have edited it but I think his criticism was towards the unused space for results, not especially towards the ads. And if that is the case, I must concur. I fail to understand why Google added a large side bar instead of adding more top bars in the unused space next to the logo (perhaps right under the search text box). The designers at Google may disagree but the Jitbit guy sure has a point.
  - sologoub 14y ago
    There is a graphic that shows 18.5% for the organic and 81.5% for the ads/rest of the area. The main reason I disagree with the conclusion is that the area used by Google, or any other company for that matter, for navigation/other tools is hardly equivalent to space used for ads. That in no way is intended to say that the space is used "efficiently".
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  He didn't go to Google looking for navigation, he went looking for the results of his search. So the way he discusses the real estate devoted to fulfilling his purpose is quite reasonable.
  - jonknee 14y ago
    Except you use the navigation to improve your search. No one wants a page completely full of organic results.
hsiaobrandon 14y ago
Arguably, from a design perspective, a wider column of text is harder to read than a narrower column of text. I personally find Google to be more legible than it was before at 53% result space. That's just me, though.
- joestringer 14y ago
  I'm not sure it is just you. Shorter columns are easier to read, which means it serves users even better; our eyes don't have to track a massive row of characters to see what the search result is.
cryptoz 14y ago
The search in our isn't considered 'search'?!
deleted 14y ago
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redorb 14y ago
my version from about a year ago https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-CZONTO-54lo/Tno6O3aK56I/AAAAAAAAAFc/pRhc_fM6big/s1267/scumbag_google.jpg https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-CZONTO-54lo/Tno6O3aK56I/A...
- lawdawg 14y ago
  For a query like "credit card", those non-organic results seem much more, if not just as, relevant than the organic results. Why do people assume that if it's an ad that it must be non-relevant? Advertisers wouldn't be advertising on these keywords unless they were converting a good percentage of users ... that means a good percentage of users are finding those links relevant. I don't use AdBlock, don't really see the reason to as I find most of the search ads to be relevant whenever I'm searching for a term that actually shows search ads (which isn't really that often). Hate for search ads just because they are ads is kind of an odd imo ...
  - onetimeuse001 14y ago
    "For a query like "credit card", those non-organic results seem much more, if not just as, relevant than the organic results" That's almost certainly on purpose to get better ad click ratio. Google manually inspects all major keywords, you can bet "credit cards," "mortgage" and "insurance" are tweaked and tweaked to Google's specification. Showing "bofa.com" when searching for mortgage isn't that useful to the average user, so people click on ads.
meritt 14y ago
Can we please change the headline to something a bit less invalid and full of sensationalism? This is a perfect example of distorting statistics to serve ones purpose. * Author has a small screen. * Author compares results space vs everything else, and then calls it "ads" On my 1920x1200 screen, overall ad space and results space actually take up the same amount of space. There's a ton of UI and white-space though. While Google could arguably make better use of their empty space, suggesting the remainder is entirely ads is absurd. Screenshot with results in red and ads in blue: http://i.imgur.com/YTspx.png http://i.imgur.com/YTspx.png
- Wilya 14y ago
  > * Author has a small screen. Author has a big screen. His screenshot shows five results above the fold. I can barely see two on my 1280x800. The argument works both ways.
  - meritt 14y ago
    1280x960 is not a "big screen" by any modern definition.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    The CRT I threw out years ago was 1280x1024. It wasn't big then, and a smaller screen isn't big now. Even if you're on something like an iPad you still have 1024 vertical and end up with plenty of content. Only netbooks and/or low-quality screens have this issue.
typpo 14y ago
Is that actually so different from the way things used to be? If you run the example 2008 query, "open source social networking," the number of ads hasn't changed. It seems like most of this complaint should be directed at the navigation sidebar to the left. I'd imagine Google tested the sidebar ad nauseam, though, and is leaving it there for a reason (probably increased engagement in other search products and more readily exposes advanced refinements).
polshaw 14y ago
Ironically (or not) jitbit.com is a similar percentage of content above the fold, with almost identical content width. I say 'or not', because there are well established readability reasons for having a narrow content width. Would many people genuinely prefer the google of the 2008 screenshot? The days of sites with full page width text are largely gone, and for good reason. I'm sure google would also suggest that the ads are content.
msg 14y ago
What I use: GoogleMonkeyR - a Greasemonkey that breaks SERP ads and instant search and allows you to format them to your liking. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9310 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9310
mbarbir 14y ago
Google would apply a Panda-induced penalty to any website that followed a similar content strategy. http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613 http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-... It's good to be the king.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
The author is only analyzing content above the fold. There's no conclusion to draw from this, other than that Google used to cram more content above the fold, like all other sites.
logical42 14y ago
maybe google is just 82% advertising.
- bhartzer 14y ago
  Actually, doesn't the amount of advertising change based on the actual query used?
  - logical42 14y ago
    that's actually a really interesting point and something which i had never really considered. googling 'computational linguistics' (for me anyhow) renders exactly zero ads, while googling 'computers' gives me almost an entire screenful.
aidenn0 14y ago
It seems to me that linear vertical space matters more than area. It still is small, but not as small. Showing ranked search results in multiple columns makes no sense, and screens have gone from 4:3 to 16:9,, so you would expect the extra area to be used for something other than search results.
- xfs 14y ago
  When you have enough vertical space, Google will screw your results with botched site crowding. See http://www.seroundtable.com/google-same-result-same-page-15287.html http://www.seroundtable.com/google-same-result-same-page-152... I've had worse, because I wanted to have 100 results in a page.
AznHisoka 14y ago
This is something Aaron Wall has been trying to expose for the past 3-4 years over at SEOBook.com (why oh why are these SO few comments compared to SEOMoz everytime I visit there? this guy is NEVER afraid to speak the truth), and it's just 1 of many disturbing trends happening. Google's mission is simple: they want you to rely less on organic search and more on Adwords for your traffic. Nowadays, you can't even see what keywords are driving traffic to your site if users are logged in (50% of queries or so). Plus it's hard to even correlated your SEO efforts with rankings because Google does stuff like drop your rankings randomly so you don't know what works.
- TomGullen 14y ago
  > Plus it's hard to even correlated your SEO efforts with rankings because Google does stuff like drop your rankings randomly And therefore they would have to increase your rankings randomly as well?
cin_ 14y ago
I almost pathologically click on the ads. If I hold down CTRL and click I am giving back more than is enough to receive such an amazing, life changing?, history changing?, service. Here's that click. The room that is taken up by the left and right columns also are welcome. I sometimes find exactly what I am looking for in the right column. I actually wish Google gave more information and less site links as results.
azakai 14y ago
Related, I noticed a few days ago that google.com, which was once the most minimalistic page possible, was cluttered by (1) an ad for chrome on top, and (2) an ad for the Google tablet on the bottom. It felt messy. Times have definitely changed.
calbear81 14y ago
"Only 18.5% of the screen is devoted to something that people are actually looking for." Once again, people dismiss ads as simply spam or something that provides no value to the search query when in study after study, at least on Adwords and SEM, paid results often boost relevance vs. a page only of organic results. This will of course differ by query and category of query but Google has already done a lot of work to make sure ads don't show for queries that have little to no commercial value or do not have enough query volume to risk jeopardizing the search experience. If you're shopping for something, the paid and Google shopping results are often more relevant than the organic results since a lot of them incorporate real time price feeds or promotion codes. These are driven by the recognition of your shopping intent Advertisers do not bid on keywords that deliver no economic value so it's in their best interest to only show up when they are the most relevant to your query. Through quality score, AdWords also shows ads that have been engaged with most often and with strong landing pages so that you don't get spammy ads or irrelevant ads that are unrelated to your query.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  This is a failure on Google's part, perhaps their most dangerous weakness.
  - calbear81 14y ago
    Why is having a business model that generates billions of dollars in revenue annually, employs tens of thousands of people, and still allows you to maintain dominance considered a failure? The ads platform is self-optimizing, punishing advertisers with poor ads, low relevance, and poor brand perception. This results in ads that are from more trustworthy sellers and whom generate real customer interaction to justify buying those ads. To me, this system encourages higher relevance in commerce queries because those who deliver the best user experiences after you leave Google are the ones that can afford to bid to the top of the ads marketplace.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      As you said, people dismiss them. That's a failure. It's a failure to deliver value to the searcher and a failure to deliver value to the advertiser. The idea is fine, but if in practice people just ignore the ads... Google is making great money from search-based ads, of course, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a massive inefficiency created by a large number of users ignoring a large number of ads. The obvious opportunity for a competitor is to correct that inefficiency and deliver more value for searchers and advertisers.
Steko 14y ago
Two minor nits about Google search: (1) the bias toward current results seems overweighted. Maybe I'm the only one this annoys. I use the custom date settings more than any other feature on Google, maybe it could always be exposed. (2) I wish there wasn't two buttons that say "News" that do different things while they have more sets of buttons in identically analogous places that say "Images" and "Maps" yet for some reason both buttons do exactly the same thing.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  Yeah, I can never remember which "News" keeps my current search and which doesn't.
K2h 14y ago
to me this is like tv shows. it use to be about 50 min of show, 10 min of commercials now its about 42 min show, 18 min commercials
mijail 14y ago
I think a big difference also is that Google's landing is clean, this is the results page. Yahoo's landing page is cluttered but their results page I would say is comparable. Could somebody do this for other sites?
ck2 14y ago
There was also a big change in May 2010 http://i.imgur.com/43a23.png http://i.imgur.com/43a23.png 2011 / May2010 / pre-May2010 (thumbnails are from searchpreview extension)
jordaninternets 14y ago
I can't believe Google removed the ability to scroll down.
brownbat 14y ago
The percentage of space occupied by ads varies depending on the search. 35% ads only 1% of the time isn't nearly so bad as 35% ads all the time. And the auctions help guarantee that ad-crowding happens most often when searchers are actually well served by advertisements. People searching for "saas help desk" probably want to find people to sell them support, rather than just info about saas. Searching for just "saas" alone reduces ad volume. Searching for "origin of saas" reduces ad levels further. Wikipedia is the top entry, and we're down to one lonely ad at the bottom of the page. Similar divergences occur with "linux" and "linux support." I'm not convinced fewer ads would be better. Imagine asking a friend for help with your broken machine, and he hands you the short biography of Linus Torvalds. When you want pure information (for me, most of the time) ads drift out of the picture. When you want to buy something, they're more prominent, just as you probably want them to be. N.B. - There is a hell of a lot of whitespace on a 1920x1080 monitor though.
davvid 14y ago
Maybe it's just me, but all that wasted empty whitespace bothers me. I think it may have gotten worse when google did their big UI overhaul. I think some screen real-estate could be saved by simply tightening the padding. I see a lot of areas that are blank. It would be really nice if the content was allowed to take some of this dead space.
ekianjo 14y ago
If you scroll down the percentage of the search results significantly increases :) I found this article quite dumb, honestly. If you make stats, make it on the whole experience, not just the first seconds using Google...
srj 14y ago
I believe the number of ads displayed varies based on the perceived usefulness of the ads in answering the user's query. The ad space above the organic search results shouldn't be lost space. Note: I work at Google but not on web search, ads, or UI design. This is just based on my personal observations.
Matt_Cutts 14y ago
So the major issues I saw with this article were: 1) the left-hand column is counted as non-search, when the left-hand column is entirely about search. The left-hand column gives you ways to refine your search: you can limit the types of search results like news/images, slice/dice search results by date, limit search results to verbatim matches or to change the geographic weighting of search results, etc. 2) the actual search box is counted as non-search, as are the estimated results count and the time the search took. 3) the article treated whitespace as non-search, when shorter columns can actually make it easier and faster for users to scan the results. That's still leaving aside facts like - We actually think our ads can be as helpful as the search results in some cases. And no, that's not a new attitude. I found a quote from 2004 that said "In entering the advertising market, Google tested our belief that highly relevant advertising can be as useful as search results or other forms of content," and I'm sure I could find similar quotes with a bit more looking. - And of course there are tons of searches where we don't show ads. A lot of people like to take a query that shows ads and say "Aha!" but they're forgetting all the queries that don't show ads. Not to mention that our ads aren't just a straight auction; we try to take into account things like the quality of the destination page in deciding whether and where to show ads, just like we do with web search results.
- BCM43 14y ago
  Perhaps a better word for it would be results. I think it is valid to point out what percentage of the page is results, because really that's what you are looking at. In reference to #2, I've never found the result count or time the search took to be of much use. I'm also not convinced that ads are actually ever useful. I'd love to see an example of one that you think is useful for the search. You do make a good point on white space. Does that only apply to whitespace near the results, or is that for the entire page?
  - Matt_Cutts 14y ago
    But the blog post headline is "Google Search is only 18% Search," and that's just not correct. I look at the result count to estimate whether I'm into the long tail of results, and I use the left-hand bar a bunch to refine searches based on time. That's all search and it goes toward making the search experience better for power users. Ads can totally be useful; here's one from earlier today: [att cordless phones]. For Google's web results, we often interpret a query [X] as "information about X." The #1 web search result I see is http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/ http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/ which does have information about cordless phones from AT&T. But I was looking for which models of cordless phones AT&T has. There's an ad that points to http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/all/ http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/... which is actually more helpful because that shows me a bunch of different models. Now you can argue that Google should be able to find and somehow return the page that AT&T bought the ad for. But that can be a hard problem (Bing returns the same page that Google does at #1 for example, as does DDG). So that ad was quite helpful for me, because it took me to a great page.
Karn 14y ago
This shouldn't be an issue to programmers. With Greasemonkey or Scriptish it's trivial to write a script to clean up the page so that you only see the results.
damian2000 14y ago
I was reminded today of the kind of tricky things google gets up to when I went to the download page for "Win32 Disk Imager" on Softpedia (as linked to by the Raspberry Pi's Download page). http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-Burning/Win32-Disk-Imager.shtml http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-Burnin... Check it out for yourself. You see that big, prominant "Download Now" button - that's an ad served by googleadservices.com. I don't know how they get away with crap like this, it surely must be against their own ad policy.
- nostrademons 14y ago
  It is against policy: http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1346295#Encouraging_accidental_clicks http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an... I'll ping folks internally. If you look at the button with Developer Tools, it's one single giant image that's an ad for Download Manager. The advertiser stuck a Download button on it and is presumably running ads on sites where you download things.
option_greek 14y ago
I had to disable ad block to see the same screen and wow what a difference. No wonder Google still looks clean to me - I'm not even seeing their ads.
sravfeyn 14y ago
I always forget that Google does ads on search page, after I installed the amazing AdBlock extension on Chrome. I don't see Google, Facebook Ads and many more, AdBlock knows what.
deleted 14y ago
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bobbybob 14y ago
google have ads above fold, but matt cutts not tell us anything about it. And how it improving user experience. Google now cares only about adwords money, not about quality of their main product - organic search results. All that stories about best possibly user experience it just tries to hide that fact.
drcube 14y ago
Use Adblock Plus. Problem solved. Google SERP is 100% relevant for me. It's just results, white space and a little bit of UI. If you think advertising is going away or getting scaled back any time soon, you're fooling yourself. Just block them and stop thinking about it. Now if only they could invent Adblock for Reality....
ashutoshrai 14y ago
Considering the present standards of organic ranking an aware user(searcher) will look for natural results more, than paid ones. So it is better to let organic results take more space on Google search pages than inorganic ads.

231 points by jitbit 14y ago

jiggy2011 14y ago

Question for people more familiar with google ads that me: I quite often type in a search term for something that I imagine must be a very common search term and I don't get any adverts whatsoever. Does this mean that nobody has bid on this keyword (because it's too expensive?) or are some search terms simply not allowed to be advertised on?

jaredmck 14y ago
Some terms don't display advertisements - if the combination of relevance and google's profit potential on a specific query is not above a certain level (which is always changing I'm sure based on yield management and user data tests), then no ads will display for that query. Most navigational queries fall into this class.
tiziano88 14y ago
By definition if no one has bid on the keyword, you can easily win the auction by bidding the minimum amount. It is likely that the terms you were searching for are not ideal targets for effective ads. Can you give an example of such query?
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I can't remember which terms I searched when I discovered this, but I tried it just now. "computer networking" yields 1 ad. "networking" yields no ads.

seanconaty 14y ago

To be fair you should factor whitespace out when you're calculating the area. In the recent screen capture all the whitespace is added to the non-search results. In the not-so-recent results there is a fair amount of whitespace added to the search results (as well as non-search).

jitbit 14y ago
I honestly thought about cutting all the white space completely, but then after having a chat with our designer... He said that every page is visually divided into blocks (even if there are no explicit visual borders of these blocks), subjectively, of course. This, the "F-pattern" and "left-to-right" orientation for the most of us brought us to an agreement that the last screen was ok... The subjective "blocks" are somewhat like this. But I agree, I shouldve been more precise
- seanconaty 14y ago
  That makes some sense; sort of defining what the whitespace is "devoted" to.
condiment 14y ago
I noticed this as well. The older search results have the same width as the new results. It's also interesting to note that the old results page is displaying multiple results for single domains using result nesting, while the new results page displays only one listing for each domain. The end result is that the same number of 'effective search results' are displayed on the page for both versions. The gradual transformation of white space into content is a natural evolution in the life of any web product. While the feature set is simple, the design can be sparse. Mature products benefit from rich feature sets, with the drawback of having to sacrifice the sparse visual design that may have initially distinguished them from the competition.

slaven 14y ago

Aaron Wall has documented the decline of organic search very well over the years. Worth checking out: http://www.seobook.com/the-sales-engine http://www.seobook.com/the-sales-engine

deleted 14y ago

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state 14y ago

This seems to me to be a similar kind of evaluation that Google would do on its own work. Nice angle.

deleted 14y ago

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WestCoastJustin 14y ago

I've been using Adblock+ for the last 6+ years. Granted the 13.8m users [1] are a drop in the bucket compared to googles non Adblock+ viewers. I was a little shocked to see this post as it is much different than what I see. For the search "saas help desk" (https://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=saas+help+desk https://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=saas+help+desk) I see: http://imgur.com/xMB6t http://imgur.com/xMB6t They see: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Vq-qWuUPZE/UER9ChRkKQI/AAAAAAAAAdU/KAojWeHbhpc/s400/serp2.gif http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Vq-qWuUPZE/UER9ChRkKQI/AAAAAAAAAd... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

shawndumas 14y ago
wow -- just installed Adblock+. the experience was a lot like finally progressing far enough in my career to not have to wear a tie; i feel freed from bondage...
jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
They are being good guys about it; they could easily block all "Ad-Blockers" and ask you to disable the adblocker to continue (as some sites already do).
- mike-cardwell 14y ago
  You underestimate the ingenuity of geeks. If Google decided to prevent people from using Ad-blockers, 24 hours later a new Ad-blocker would be released to get around it, or the existing ones would be updated.
  - Danieru 14y ago
    Except such an arms race is highly asymmetric in Google's favour. Google can have a team of 10 working full time racing Ad-Blocker's volunteers. Google can ask for ever more aggressive permissions from web masters, Ad-Blockers must play nice with browsers' plugin api. Google can hire away the most productive Ad-Blocker developers. Google can ban ad-blockers from chrome's plugin repository and halve the ad-blocker userbase overnight. Google has the warchest for a multi year engagement. Most plugin authors cannot last a single year fighting full time. If Google went total war then ad-blockers would disappear within a year. It would be a massive PR hit, maybe even a legal issue. The risks make it all a numbers game, but there does exist a point where Google can no longer ignore ad-blockers. Thus ad-block users must be careful and not become too numerous.

perfunctory 14y ago

bing seems to be doing better in this regard.

barista 14y ago
ok granted it is doing better by allocating more space to the search results. But how about the search result quality? How's it doing there?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

stcredzero 14y ago

> Is Google becoming a Yahoo? I suspect that all ad-revenue sites are subject to the same economic pressures. Almost all such companies eventually succumb to these pressures. All such companies will tend to cater to the lowest common denominator. They will tend to put their own interests (that of showing ads and increasing ad effectiveness) over the interests of users. Perhaps there is an opportunity for a paid integrated search/email/calendar/reminders/maps/events application? You pay them $5 or $10 per month, and they do their best to create the best possible experience for you. Apple and Microsoft are well positioned to become this company as well, as is Google. Wouldn't it be ironic if Yahoo! became this company?

codeka 14y ago
> Perhaps there is an opportunity for a paid integrated search/email/calendar/reminders/maps/events application? You pay them $5 or $10 per month, and they do their best to create the best possible experience for you. You've just described Google Apps for Business (well, except for search).
tedunangst 14y ago
The failure of A/B testing. More ads => more revenue. People won't abandon the site immediately just because a new ad or two showed up, like a slow boiling pot, so short term effects are always positive.
- asr 14y ago
  Just like the sesame-seed hamburger bun: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/11.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/11.html (Though, personally, in this case, I don't think Google's getting enough credit. The added space for search tools is designed to make search better for most users, and probably do, even if most of us don't need them.)

mmackh 14y ago

I've had trouble staying focused when using Google a while back and decided to write a Chrome extension for improving the Google Search experience. Here's the URL for those interested: http://restfulpanda.com/post/25658805059/cleaning-google http://restfulpanda.com/post/25658805059/cleaning-google EDIT: Turns this: http://f.cl.ly/items/2y1F0d2d0a2K3L1n0Q2m/1.png http://f.cl.ly/items/2y1F0d2d0a2K3L1n0Q2m/1.png Into this: http://f.cl.ly/items/2P3B2c0X0V0Q3U0h3e3A/2.png http://f.cl.ly/items/2P3B2c0X0V0Q3U0h3e3A/2.png

mistercow 14y ago
A big improvement, but as with ad blockers, you still have search results crammed into a fairly narrow box. Obviously, you won't be able to get Google to show longer titles and descriptions, but you should be able to widen the box so that the two-line descriptions end up on one line, which would fit more results on each page.
mattmanser 14y ago
I just wish you could get it to expand rightwards and get the longer descriptions back, the amount of space they've wasted to 'integrate' G+ really annoys me.

kevinburke 14y ago

This observation made the rounds at Google a few months ago. Note also it depends on the topic of your search. 3 ads in the yellow box are reserved for highly monetized queries - "flowers" or "car insurance" for example. Queries about programming topics - "sinatra post parameters" is one I tried a few minutes ago - usually don't have ads.

barista 14y ago
are the "highly monetized queries" queries also the most common queries?
- sharkweek 14y ago
  They can be -- but not necessarily. It has a lot to do with conversions. Someone searching "car insurance" or "cheap flights" is most likely on the hunt for something they are willing to pay for; while someone searching "football scores" is most likely just looking for free information. Of course this doesn't even scratch the surface of running a site for ad revenue that provides free information to common search questions, e.g., "how do I change the oil in my car"
  - ececconi 14y ago
    Wow I just searched NCAA rankings and saw no ads.
  - kevinburke 14y ago
    Ads are actually more likely to provide the answer to your question, or the solution to your task, when you're searching for something to buy. Which may weigh into why Google puts so many of them on the page.
    - vidarh 14y ago
      It's one of the things that prevents me from ad-blocking sites like Google. Some of the time I will actively be searching for the ads, and avoid the natural results, because the natural results for some product searches can be extremely spammy with "review" sites and comparison shopping sites with horrible user experiences dominating the results, while the paid results are usually decent retailers or distributors.

polyfractal 14y ago

Not to be a shill for Duck Duck Go, but the amount of search information displayed is refreshingly dense: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=saas+help+desk https://duckduckgo.com/?q=saas+help+desk https://duckduckgo.com/?q=travel https://duckduckgo.com/?q=travel

WestCoastJustin 14y ago
First time I have seen mapquest used anywhere other than mapquest.com.
limejuice 14y ago
I made duckduckgo.com my home page several months ago after I saw http://donttrack.us/ http://donttrack.us/, and it has been working fine. The presentation is nicer than google. I have AdBlock enabled, so I don't see the ads on either site. I like the infinite scroll on duckduckgo; I have AutoPager plugin on chrome to get something similar with google.
lawdawg 14y ago
http://www.google.com/search?q=saas+help+desk http://www.google.com/search?q=saas+help+desk How is DDG any better really?
- polyfractal 14y ago
  I'm not bombarded by fifteen different ads, who are all trying to pretend like search results? The results are hit or miss...I probably !g about half my queries. But the other half are entirely pleasant experiences and I'm hopeful DDG continues to get better.
  - enneff 14y ago
    The ads on the Google result page are probably better links than most of the organic results. People who pay for traffic usually make the payoff worthwhile.
    - 14y ago

mistercow 14y ago

At first I thought "well, if you're using an ad blocker, it's different", but in Google's case, you just end up with white space instead of ads because the search results are still crammed into a 42em wide box. I wonder if there's a user script or chrome plugin to fix that.

fear91 14y ago

Some results are even worse. There were keywords where you could see only 7 organic results. The rest was AdWords. To make things worse, Google adds more and more "product search" results (paid placement). With each day, there's less and less traffic for those people who don't pay Google. I suspect that the paid placement trend will increase until it is possible. To make things worse, Google not only decreases the SERP "real estate". They also introduce frequent algorithm updates which tend to drop down websites which earn on search-engine traffic. Leaving those which may have lesser quality but don't earn on their traffic ( no monetization ). And if you do it to a million websites, you will gain quite a lot of new AdWords buyers. Some of them have to try your PPC ads. Let's say that 10% of them will try to get traffic out of PPC - now you've got yourself 100.000 paying customers. It's obvious they want to force people both to buy and to click ads. They don't gain anything by sending free traffic to other affiliate websites ( which will then convert to sales/leads ). The question is: Where do you draw a line between a search engine and an "ad engine"? To many people, especially those less tech-savy, Google = Internet. I personally think, it's pretty bad for the overall state of e-economy to have this one big mogul who administers the majority of targetted traffic. He wants his share of the pie from everyone. If you are too small to pay, fuck you. They don't need you. The consumer won't notice you are not in the search results, there are 50 other websites happy to take your place. Either you are at the top or you don't exist. It'd be great if there would be something like Google but with a more "socialistic" approach. Instead of having a few websites occupying the top place, provide the traffic to other, smaller players. So the e-economy can expand more.

fpgeek 14y ago
> Instead of having a few websites occupying the top place, provide the traffic to other, smaller players. So the e-economy can expand more. How would you do that? Throw in some random numbers to shuffle the search results?

sologoub 14y ago

In the image where you show the 18.5% organic footprint vs 81.5% ad footprint, you are lumping in a lot of page real estate used for navigation and search tools. The entire left hand side is not add related. I'd be a more accurate/fairer way to represent the info by providing 3 categories: organic, ads, navigation/misc. If you did this, you'd provably see a closer to 40/60 split, still in favor of ads. Similar to what you showed in your screenshot from the past.

devcpp 14y ago
I looked for "81" in the page and found nothing. Apparently, he never said that 81.5% of the area is made up of ads. He may have edited it but I think his criticism was towards the unused space for results, not especially towards the ads. And if that is the case, I must concur. I fail to understand why Google added a large side bar instead of adding more top bars in the unused space next to the logo (perhaps right under the search text box). The designers at Google may disagree but the Jitbit guy sure has a point.
- sologoub 14y ago
  There is a graphic that shows 18.5% for the organic and 81.5% for the ads/rest of the area. The main reason I disagree with the conclusion is that the area used by Google, or any other company for that matter, for navigation/other tools is hardly equivalent to space used for ads. That in no way is intended to say that the space is used "efficiently".
waterlesscloud 14y ago
He didn't go to Google looking for navigation, he went looking for the results of his search. So the way he discusses the real estate devoted to fulfilling his purpose is quite reasonable.
- jonknee 14y ago
  Except you use the navigation to improve your search. No one wants a page completely full of organic results.

hsiaobrandon 14y ago

Arguably, from a design perspective, a wider column of text is harder to read than a narrower column of text. I personally find Google to be more legible than it was before at 53% result space. That's just me, though.

joestringer 14y ago
I'm not sure it is just you. Shorter columns are easier to read, which means it serves users even better; our eyes don't have to track a massive row of characters to see what the search result is.

cryptoz 14y ago

The search in our isn't considered 'search'?!

deleted 14y ago

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redorb 14y ago

my version from about a year ago https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-CZONTO-54lo/Tno6O3aK56I/AAAAAAAAAFc/pRhc_fM6big/s1267/scumbag_google.jpg https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-CZONTO-54lo/Tno6O3aK56I/A...

lawdawg 14y ago
For a query like "credit card", those non-organic results seem much more, if not just as, relevant than the organic results. Why do people assume that if it's an ad that it must be non-relevant? Advertisers wouldn't be advertising on these keywords unless they were converting a good percentage of users ... that means a good percentage of users are finding those links relevant. I don't use AdBlock, don't really see the reason to as I find most of the search ads to be relevant whenever I'm searching for a term that actually shows search ads (which isn't really that often). Hate for search ads just because they are ads is kind of an odd imo ...
- onetimeuse001 14y ago
  "For a query like "credit card", those non-organic results seem much more, if not just as, relevant than the organic results" That's almost certainly on purpose to get better ad click ratio. Google manually inspects all major keywords, you can bet "credit cards," "mortgage" and "insurance" are tweaked and tweaked to Google's specification. Showing "bofa.com" when searching for mortgage isn't that useful to the average user, so people click on ads.

meritt 14y ago

Can we please change the headline to something a bit less invalid and full of sensationalism? This is a perfect example of distorting statistics to serve ones purpose. * Author has a small screen. * Author compares results space vs everything else, and then calls it "ads" On my 1920x1200 screen, overall ad space and results space actually take up the same amount of space. There's a ton of UI and white-space though. While Google could arguably make better use of their empty space, suggesting the remainder is entirely ads is absurd. Screenshot with results in red and ads in blue: http://i.imgur.com/YTspx.png http://i.imgur.com/YTspx.png

Wilya 14y ago
> * Author has a small screen. Author has a big screen. His screenshot shows five results above the fold. I can barely see two on my 1280x800. The argument works both ways.
- meritt 14y ago
  1280x960 is not a "big screen" by any modern definition.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  The CRT I threw out years ago was 1280x1024. It wasn't big then, and a smaller screen isn't big now. Even if you're on something like an iPad you still have 1024 vertical and end up with plenty of content. Only netbooks and/or low-quality screens have this issue.

typpo 14y ago

Is that actually so different from the way things used to be? If you run the example 2008 query, "open source social networking," the number of ads hasn't changed. It seems like most of this complaint should be directed at the navigation sidebar to the left. I'd imagine Google tested the sidebar ad nauseam, though, and is leaving it there for a reason (probably increased engagement in other search products and more readily exposes advanced refinements).

polshaw 14y ago

Ironically (or not) jitbit.com is a similar percentage of content above the fold, with almost identical content width. I say 'or not', because there are well established readability reasons for having a narrow content width. Would many people genuinely prefer the google of the 2008 screenshot? The days of sites with full page width text are largely gone, and for good reason. I'm sure google would also suggest that the ads are content.

msg 14y ago

What I use: GoogleMonkeyR - a Greasemonkey that breaks SERP ads and instant search and allows you to format them to your liking. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9310 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9310

mbarbir 14y ago

Google would apply a Panda-induced penalty to any website that followed a similar content strategy. http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613 http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-... It's good to be the king.

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

The author is only analyzing content above the fold. There's no conclusion to draw from this, other than that Google used to cram more content above the fold, like all other sites.

logical42 14y ago

maybe google is just 82% advertising.

bhartzer 14y ago
Actually, doesn't the amount of advertising change based on the actual query used?
- logical42 14y ago
  that's actually a really interesting point and something which i had never really considered. googling 'computational linguistics' (for me anyhow) renders exactly zero ads, while googling 'computers' gives me almost an entire screenful.

aidenn0 14y ago

It seems to me that linear vertical space matters more than area. It still is small, but not as small. Showing ranked search results in multiple columns makes no sense, and screens have gone from 4:3 to 16:9,, so you would expect the extra area to be used for something other than search results.

xfs 14y ago
When you have enough vertical space, Google will screw your results with botched site crowding. See http://www.seroundtable.com/google-same-result-same-page-15287.html http://www.seroundtable.com/google-same-result-same-page-152... I've had worse, because I wanted to have 100 results in a page.

AznHisoka 14y ago

This is something Aaron Wall has been trying to expose for the past 3-4 years over at SEOBook.com (why oh why are these SO few comments compared to SEOMoz everytime I visit there? this guy is NEVER afraid to speak the truth), and it's just 1 of many disturbing trends happening. Google's mission is simple: they want you to rely less on organic search and more on Adwords for your traffic. Nowadays, you can't even see what keywords are driving traffic to your site if users are logged in (50% of queries or so). Plus it's hard to even correlated your SEO efforts with rankings because Google does stuff like drop your rankings randomly so you don't know what works.

TomGullen 14y ago
> Plus it's hard to even correlated your SEO efforts with rankings because Google does stuff like drop your rankings randomly And therefore they would have to increase your rankings randomly as well?

cin_ 14y ago

I almost pathologically click on the ads. If I hold down CTRL and click I am giving back more than is enough to receive such an amazing, life changing?, history changing?, service. Here's that click. The room that is taken up by the left and right columns also are welcome. I sometimes find exactly what I am looking for in the right column. I actually wish Google gave more information and less site links as results.

azakai 14y ago

Related, I noticed a few days ago that google.com, which was once the most minimalistic page possible, was cluttered by (1) an ad for chrome on top, and (2) an ad for the Google tablet on the bottom. It felt messy. Times have definitely changed.

calbear81 14y ago

"Only 18.5% of the screen is devoted to something that people are actually looking for." Once again, people dismiss ads as simply spam or something that provides no value to the search query when in study after study, at least on Adwords and SEM, paid results often boost relevance vs. a page only of organic results. This will of course differ by query and category of query but Google has already done a lot of work to make sure ads don't show for queries that have little to no commercial value or do not have enough query volume to risk jeopardizing the search experience. If you're shopping for something, the paid and Google shopping results are often more relevant than the organic results since a lot of them incorporate real time price feeds or promotion codes. These are driven by the recognition of your shopping intent Advertisers do not bid on keywords that deliver no economic value so it's in their best interest to only show up when they are the most relevant to your query. Through quality score, AdWords also shows ads that have been engaged with most often and with strong landing pages so that you don't get spammy ads or irrelevant ads that are unrelated to your query.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
This is a failure on Google's part, perhaps their most dangerous weakness.
- calbear81 14y ago
  Why is having a business model that generates billions of dollars in revenue annually, employs tens of thousands of people, and still allows you to maintain dominance considered a failure? The ads platform is self-optimizing, punishing advertisers with poor ads, low relevance, and poor brand perception. This results in ads that are from more trustworthy sellers and whom generate real customer interaction to justify buying those ads. To me, this system encourages higher relevance in commerce queries because those who deliver the best user experiences after you leave Google are the ones that can afford to bid to the top of the ads marketplace.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    As you said, people dismiss them. That's a failure. It's a failure to deliver value to the searcher and a failure to deliver value to the advertiser. The idea is fine, but if in practice people just ignore the ads... Google is making great money from search-based ads, of course, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a massive inefficiency created by a large number of users ignoring a large number of ads. The obvious opportunity for a competitor is to correct that inefficiency and deliver more value for searchers and advertisers.

Steko 14y ago

Two minor nits about Google search: (1) the bias toward current results seems overweighted. Maybe I'm the only one this annoys. I use the custom date settings more than any other feature on Google, maybe it could always be exposed. (2) I wish there wasn't two buttons that say "News" that do different things while they have more sets of buttons in identically analogous places that say "Images" and "Maps" yet for some reason both buttons do exactly the same thing.

fpgeek 14y ago
Yeah, I can never remember which "News" keeps my current search and which doesn't.

K2h 14y ago

to me this is like tv shows. it use to be about 50 min of show, 10 min of commercials now its about 42 min show, 18 min commercials

mijail 14y ago

I think a big difference also is that Google's landing is clean, this is the results page. Yahoo's landing page is cluttered but their results page I would say is comparable. Could somebody do this for other sites?

ck2 14y ago

There was also a big change in May 2010 http://i.imgur.com/43a23.png http://i.imgur.com/43a23.png 2011 / May2010 / pre-May2010 (thumbnails are from searchpreview extension)

jordaninternets 14y ago

I can't believe Google removed the ability to scroll down.

brownbat 14y ago

The percentage of space occupied by ads varies depending on the search. 35% ads only 1% of the time isn't nearly so bad as 35% ads all the time. And the auctions help guarantee that ad-crowding happens most often when searchers are actually well served by advertisements. People searching for "saas help desk" probably want to find people to sell them support, rather than just info about saas. Searching for just "saas" alone reduces ad volume. Searching for "origin of saas" reduces ad levels further. Wikipedia is the top entry, and we're down to one lonely ad at the bottom of the page. Similar divergences occur with "linux" and "linux support." I'm not convinced fewer ads would be better. Imagine asking a friend for help with your broken machine, and he hands you the short biography of Linus Torvalds. When you want pure information (for me, most of the time) ads drift out of the picture. When you want to buy something, they're more prominent, just as you probably want them to be. N.B. - There is a hell of a lot of whitespace on a 1920x1080 monitor though.

davvid 14y ago

Maybe it's just me, but all that wasted empty whitespace bothers me. I think it may have gotten worse when google did their big UI overhaul. I think some screen real-estate could be saved by simply tightening the padding. I see a lot of areas that are blank. It would be really nice if the content was allowed to take some of this dead space.

ekianjo 14y ago

If you scroll down the percentage of the search results significantly increases :) I found this article quite dumb, honestly. If you make stats, make it on the whole experience, not just the first seconds using Google...

srj 14y ago

I believe the number of ads displayed varies based on the perceived usefulness of the ads in answering the user's query. The ad space above the organic search results shouldn't be lost space. Note: I work at Google but not on web search, ads, or UI design. This is just based on my personal observations.

Matt_Cutts 14y ago

So the major issues I saw with this article were: 1) the left-hand column is counted as non-search, when the left-hand column is entirely about search. The left-hand column gives you ways to refine your search: you can limit the types of search results like news/images, slice/dice search results by date, limit search results to verbatim matches or to change the geographic weighting of search results, etc. 2) the actual search box is counted as non-search, as are the estimated results count and the time the search took. 3) the article treated whitespace as non-search, when shorter columns can actually make it easier and faster for users to scan the results. That's still leaving aside facts like - We actually think our ads can be as helpful as the search results in some cases. And no, that's not a new attitude. I found a quote from 2004 that said "In entering the advertising market, Google tested our belief that highly relevant advertising can be as useful as search results or other forms of content," and I'm sure I could find similar quotes with a bit more looking. - And of course there are tons of searches where we don't show ads. A lot of people like to take a query that shows ads and say "Aha!" but they're forgetting all the queries that don't show ads. Not to mention that our ads aren't just a straight auction; we try to take into account things like the quality of the destination page in deciding whether and where to show ads, just like we do with web search results.

BCM43 14y ago
Perhaps a better word for it would be results. I think it is valid to point out what percentage of the page is results, because really that's what you are looking at. In reference to #2, I've never found the result count or time the search took to be of much use. I'm also not convinced that ads are actually ever useful. I'd love to see an example of one that you think is useful for the search. You do make a good point on white space. Does that only apply to whitespace near the results, or is that for the entire page?
- Matt_Cutts 14y ago
  But the blog post headline is "Google Search is only 18% Search," and that's just not correct. I look at the result count to estimate whether I'm into the long tail of results, and I use the left-hand bar a bunch to refine searches based on time. That's all search and it goes toward making the search experience better for power users. Ads can totally be useful; here's one from earlier today: [att cordless phones]. For Google's web results, we often interpret a query [X] as "information about X." The #1 web search result I see is http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/ http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/ which does have information about cordless phones from AT&T. But I was looking for which models of cordless phones AT&T has. There's an ad that points to http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/all/ http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/... which is actually more helpful because that shows me a bunch of different models. Now you can argue that Google should be able to find and somehow return the page that AT&T bought the ad for. But that can be a hard problem (Bing returns the same page that Google does at #1 for example, as does DDG). So that ad was quite helpful for me, because it took me to a great page.

Karn 14y ago

This shouldn't be an issue to programmers. With Greasemonkey or Scriptish it's trivial to write a script to clean up the page so that you only see the results.

damian2000 14y ago

I was reminded today of the kind of tricky things google gets up to when I went to the download page for "Win32 Disk Imager" on Softpedia (as linked to by the Raspberry Pi's Download page). http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-Burning/Win32-Disk-Imager.shtml http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-Burnin... Check it out for yourself. You see that big, prominant "Download Now" button - that's an ad served by googleadservices.com. I don't know how they get away with crap like this, it surely must be against their own ad policy.

nostrademons 14y ago
It is against policy: http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1346295#Encouraging_accidental_clicks http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an... I'll ping folks internally. If you look at the button with Developer Tools, it's one single giant image that's an ad for Download Manager. The advertiser stuck a Download button on it and is presumably running ads on sites where you download things.

option_greek 14y ago

I had to disable ad block to see the same screen and wow what a difference. No wonder Google still looks clean to me - I'm not even seeing their ads.

sravfeyn 14y ago

I always forget that Google does ads on search page, after I installed the amazing AdBlock extension on Chrome. I don't see Google, Facebook Ads and many more, AdBlock knows what.

deleted 14y ago

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bobbybob 14y ago

google have ads above fold, but matt cutts not tell us anything about it. And how it improving user experience. Google now cares only about adwords money, not about quality of their main product - organic search results. All that stories about best possibly user experience it just tries to hide that fact.

drcube 14y ago

Use Adblock Plus. Problem solved. Google SERP is 100% relevant for me. It's just results, white space and a little bit of UI. If you think advertising is going away or getting scaled back any time soon, you're fooling yourself. Just block them and stop thinking about it. Now if only they could invent Adblock for Reality....

ashutoshrai 14y ago

Considering the present standards of organic ranking an aware user(searcher) will look for natural results more, than paid ones. So it is better to let organic results take more space on Google search pages than inorganic ads.