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How Google is Killing Organic Search

535 points by akharris 13y ago

sethbannon 13y ago
DuckDuckGo is far less cluttered, which makes sense considering they have less things to push aside from the results: http://i.imgur.com/OnBJHkS.png http://i.imgur.com/OnBJHkS.png
- GuiA 13y ago
  In light of "designy" things like this, and other "ideological" things that have transpired in the past few weeks, I've been forcing myself to use DuckDuckGo. It's been about a month now, and I find the results terrible. I want to love it, but the first 10 results are pretty much never what I want. Sadly, Google still performs better on this front for me. If anyone has tips to make it better, I'd be very happy to hear them.
  - antjanus 13y ago
    Bing is a little bit better in terms of screen real estate. They seem to push the top organic results at the top of the page, and put local results in between the top 2-3 and the next 6 results. There are barely any ads. Also, after a year of non-stop use, i can tell you right now that Bing predicts what I'm looking for far better than Google ever did.
    - psbp 13y ago
      Are we using the same bing? The searches I just tested returned just as many bing-centric results as google does.
  - Ziomislaw 13y ago
    I believe it might be because DDG is not Google. What works on google might not work the same in DDG. How long have you been using google? Probably long time. During this time you (unconsiously) learned how to ask questions "google way", now you need to learn to quack :p I also found that DDG sometimes (not very often) does not find what I am looking for. Mostly it is because I know nothing of the subject ie. using a description of a "thing" I am looking for instead of its name, etc. - theese are the things google is better at. Regardless, if you find such query than please submit it to ddg, they are very responsive and results do get better.
    - Afforess 13y ago
      >How long have you been using google? Probably long time. During this time you (unconsiously) learned how to ask questions "google way", now you need to learn to quack :p I understand this, but most of us are looking for an alternative to Google and not a completely different search engine.
      - yen223 13y ago
        Google with Adblock does the trick.
        hga 13y ago
        "Out of the box" I don't find that to be true, at least not with Linux 32 bit Firefox 21.0 and Chrome 27.0.1453.93 just now. Same results for auto mechanic and Italian restaurant, except my local market is too small for anyone to have bought ads for the latter. I assume I could configure Adblock Plus to hide the Google ads, but at least for me and what I normally search for they're not really an issue.
      - dotmanish 13y ago
        Take a look at StartPage (http://startpage.com http://startpage.com) - similar Privacy Policy.
        Afforess 13y ago
        I did, but it still includes local results (it thinks I am in New York City). I signed up for a Google API account and tried the Google custom search engine and searched for "pizza restaurants" and received different results than with Startpage. Startpage tried to sell me NYC pizza. Google Custom Search: http://i.imgur.com/PLZ79Vk.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/PLZ79Vk.png?1 Startpage: http://i.imgur.com/5ui5LQc.png http://i.imgur.com/5ui5LQc.png
  - api 13y ago
    I've found DDG to be better at finding obscure content, and the Goog to be better at finding what I call "canonical" content. For example, if I search for "binary tree" I probably want Wikipedia followed maybe by StackExchange. Google does that, while DDG sends me deep into the netherworld.
    - PanickedOmlette 13y ago
      Yeah, sadly that happens sometimes. I revert to Google (with bang syntax) when I am looking for something programming related and want a lot of results from stackoverflow. However, DDG is definitely better at finding some things. I recently searched for gentoo+postgresql related stuff and got highly relevant results, which weren't in Google's SERP.
      - yaddayadda 13y ago
        If you want just stackoverflow results and are already using bang syntax to get them from Google, then you should just switch from !g to !so.
        ufo 13y ago
        An additional bonus of "!so" is that works with stack overflow search syntax like tag names between brackets.
    - yaddayadda 13y ago
      One awesome thing about DDG is their !bang searches. It won't automate an unknown search, but if you know the first thing you're going to want is the Wikipedia entry you just search ["binary tree" !w]; for related StackExchange questions ["binary tree" !so]; you can even do a straight goggle search ["binary tree" !g]. For the available !bangs check out - https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
      - bad_user 13y ago
        You don't need DDG for that, when you can use Firefox (or Chrome). All you need to do on a website with a search box is to right-click on that search box -> Add Keyword for this Search... and then add a shortcut. The cool thing about it is that it is extensible. You don't need to settle for the fixed "bangs" that DDG provides. For example, I have a "dex" shortcut for searching an online dictionary of my native language. Also, it takes less time to add a shortcut of interest than it is to read the DDG documentation page to find out the right bang for you. If you care about privacy, then this is also a no-brainer, since you don't go through a third-party server anymore.
  - limejuice 13y ago
    I've been using DDG for about 1 year now, and I haven't missed google at all. The few times I don't find what I want, I !g to see google results, but they haven't seemed any better. I find as more subject specific sites have grown, that generic search like ddg and google aren't as important to me. I do more searches on sites like stackoverflow, yelp, maps.google.com, tripadivsor, etc. than ddg.
    - yaddayadda 13y ago
      I've been doing the Duck about that long now, and I miss google enough that !g gets used daily. But, I also try to do all of my initial searches, even !g, !so, !w, !gi, and !a through DDG. And, I've set my Firefox address bar to default to DDG.
  - runn1ng 13y ago
    Try startpage https://startpage.com/ https://startpage.com/ It's basically google, but without the tracking. (Or so they say.)
- Kylekramer 13y ago
  Not exactly a fair comparison considering you are using some sort of software to block the ad I get on that search. I only get three search results on my screen, if you consider the Wikipedia info and ad to not be organic, very similar to Google search. And frankly, those search results are useless. If I am searching for auto mechanic, it is highly unlikely I am doing so to know the definition of an auto mechanic. Google may be creepy in its tracking, but at least by tracking me they can point me to a mechanic in my area.
  - tripzilch 13y ago
    > Google may be creepy in its tracking, but at least by tracking me they can point me to a mechanic in my area. Surely you mean "at least by tracking me they can point me to a mechanic in my area without having to go through the trouble of specifying the area in the search box". You almost make it sound as if Google is providing you service that is worth being tracked over. They're not. It's perfectly possible to find what you're looking for without the search engine knowing who or where you are. The only thing you get in exchange for being tracked is the "convenience" of not having to type "New York" after your query.
- WayneDB 13y ago
  I've been using StartPage.com which another HNer had recommended. I like it better than DDG because it seems faster and it also uses Google's search results instead of Bing's.
- fuzzywalrus 13y ago
  I've really tried to make a go of getting out of the google verse. I set DuckDuckGo as my default but it was interfering with my ability to work, when searching for code. I'm using Bing as my default but occasionally I still use google for searching some snippets.
sctt311 13y ago
Great article! Sad in a way how Google continues to dominate and impose it's will on us.
- jordanthoms 13y ago
  Yeah, fancy showing relevant local results when you search for a Restaurant! The bastards!
Eclyps 13y ago
For some reason I was surprised to see bing's results even more cluttered and useless... http://i.imgur.com/kuRTMhO.png http://i.imgur.com/kuRTMhO.png You would think that bing would be trying to win the popularity contest by actually providing more relevant searches in the short term and then expanding ads in the future...
- estel 13y ago
  I'm not sure why Google's results might be said to be /useless/? There's definitely an interesting argument to be made about Google using a monopolistic position in search to cross-promote some of their other products (local, ads, maps), but the OP's examples seem to show results that quite likely exactly what the user would have been searching for. I guess what I'm saying is that pure organic search isn't necessarily the optimal way for a user to find the information they're looking for.
andrewljohnson 13y ago
I'm typically a Google fanboy, but spot on. Here's a search for sushi for me: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3epmld2ffqzg3f/Screen%20Shot%202013-07-01%20at%209.38.09%20AM.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3epmld2ffqzg3f/Screen%20Shot%2020... It's like full circle back to Yahoo. Maybe this is a result of listening to the data too much, and not depending on the greater vision enough. Or maybe it's the future and you're gonna love it.
- zalew 13y ago
  mine is even worse, because google apparently has trouble with me not being in the USA http://i.imgur.com/sQ5lue3.png http://i.imgur.com/sQ5lue3.png
  - hnriot 13y ago
    What did you expect it to show you? It seems like a decent result to me. Possibly google doesn't know any sushi restaurants near you in Warsaw.
    - zalew 13y ago
      pointless zip-code form.
      - bdegman 13y ago
        It's not pointless if you are looking for a place to eat sushi. You're performing a hypothetical search for something that you aren't actually looking for and then calling the results pointless.
        Wilya 13y ago
        Google can pinpoint your location very accurately, and they are usually quite agressive in promoting local results (including for tech queries, which is a pretty bad idea), yet they ask people in Poland: "In which US city are you ?". I find that quite funny, to be honest.
philhippus 13y ago
Let them greed themselves into irrelevance I say. That leaves the door open for some YC startup to implement some type of peer to peer search protocol that will leave google in the dust.
- philippelh 13y ago
  It remembers me this http://yacy.net/en/ http://yacy.net/en/
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
There is a way to increase the percentage of organic search results on a Google page, with relative ease. Just scroll down.
- goostavos 13y ago
  I mean, really, what is the article complaining about here? The most often clicked on organic search results appear above the fold. If you need more, scroll down a bit. Maybe I'm the minority, but if what I'm looking for isn't one of the first few results, I modify my query. Google is showing the stuff that makes it money, and the organic stuff we're most likely to need. And at the end of the day, what we're talking about is having to scroll down on a page. Faux blog outrage.
  - ChrisAntaki 13y ago
    Agreed! Personally, I use DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons, but I have a ton of respect for Google. The blog post is complaining about some trivial stuff, that I'm sure Google has spent (hundreds of) thousands analyzing.
  - estel 13y ago
    Indeed, I wasn't really aware that the "fold" was really much of an issue any more with modern web design. Users expect to, and do, scroll down; it's no big deal :/
- jasey 13y ago
  If you have ever looked at a heatmap of where users scroll down to on a given page. It will clearly show you that the prime realestate is above the fold (before you start scrolling)
ZanderEarth32 13y ago
While this is true, users are still clicking organic results much more often than the paid options even though the organic results real estate keeps shrinking[1]. Even with the shrinking organic screen space, the first three results still capture the vast majority of the clicks, so results 4-10 receive fewer clicks regardless of the amount of space given to organic results. I'd like to see a study where organic results 1-10 all appear on the page above the fold, giving users the ability to see all the results without having to scroll and measure click through rates at that time. 1. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2200730/Organic-vs.-Paid-Search-Results-Organic-Wins-94-of-Time http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2200730/Organic-vs.-Pai...
marban 13y ago
goto.com anyone?
soundgecko 13y ago
There's the other problem of decreasing contrast and lack of borders separating the last ad and first organic search result. http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/ http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional... A few years ago this was the style http://www.ismoip.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Screenshot1.png http://www.ismoip.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Screen... Before that http://cdn.userstyles.org/style_screenshot_thumbnails/58617_after.jpeg http://cdn.userstyles.org/style_screenshot_thumbnails/58617_... Now http://i.imgur.com/Wmdd0.png http://i.imgur.com/Wmdd0.png Some of those keywords are worth tens of dollars per click so no wonder,the colors have been A/B optmized to get the most clicks from people not knowing they are ads. Comparison: Google: #fff7ec Bing: #f9fcf7 Yahoo: #fafaff DuckDuckGo: (255,212,0,0.18) Not to say that Bing, Yahoo etc. are much better but I expect more from the "Do No Evil" Google rather than increasing the next quarter's earnings instead of targeting older people and people with bad monitors and hurting people who did a lot of good work to come in the first few in organic results but don't and/or can't pay Google for expensive ads. Also, Bing and the rest continue to mostly lose money and they can't afford to separate ads while the big guy continues to reduce the difference between ads and search results. "Study:Contrast sensitivity gradually decreases with age" http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphologic=0 http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphol...
- hncommenter13 13y ago
  Note that the FTC agrees with you and recently made an announcement[1] regarding the shading of the ad result box, among other requirements for search engines. The study the FTC cites[2] indicates that fully half of individuals didn't even realize the page contained ads. [1] http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/06/searchengine.shtm http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/06/searchengine.shtm [2] http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results
programminggeek 13y ago
What you don't understand is Google's been doing this for almost a decade now. It's about profit optimization while not pissing off your users, or sometimes helping them even. A paid result can be a useful thing and might even be better than an organic result in many cases, but both have their pitfalls and it's not surprising for them to keep going this route more and more. Google is a company, not a nonprofit. They are in it for the money. Why is anyone surprised?
- notsosmart 13y ago
  Not surprised, but they have 65% share of search in the US, so it's a disturbing trend for high quality sites ranking organically.
saalweachter 13y ago
Nit: this article is really criticizing a UI change which makes local results more prominent (in that they take over the entire page). The local results at the top of the page when you search for "Italian restaurants" are all still organic. In fact, whenever there's a map on the right-and side of the page, it's displacing ads. Now, you can be against Google ever making a UI change, or even against Google showing different results for "Italian restaurants" in New York and Chicago, but this doesn't really have anything to do with "organic" search results.
- 300bps 13y ago
  You may have missed this part of the article: The scariest part of this is that, if you sell something using the internet, regardless of whether or not you see yourself as a “local" business - or think you’re competing with Google - Google sees you as competition. Searching for “Camera" or “Buy a Dress Shirt" gets you a nearly identical split of screen real estate as that of “local" searches.
- akharris 13y ago
  The issue there is that the "organic" results you're talking about that show in either the map or the carousel aren't organic at all - they're google local listings. As a restaurant, you are now incentivized to a) buy ads to get traffic from the ad units b) give google data (effectively building a whole other website) through google+/local. You are very much being de-incentivized from investing in a page that is outside of google's universe, because you're only shot there is pure organic, which matters less and less.
  - 3825 13y ago
    I find this interesting. I didn't think of Google local listing as not organic but I did the search in the article[1] and sure enough it takes a lot of the real estate. Perhaps, Google could publish a standard way to write your own self-hosted Places page? We will still have questions on how the ranking will work and whether Google will prioritize its own Google+ place pages over self-hosted place pages but I think this would be a start. What do you think? [1] http://i.imgur.com/Bf74Dd7.png http://i.imgur.com/Bf74Dd7.png
jmarbach 13y ago
I agree with the arguments here on the whole. However, if you declare a local search on your own, by simply including "italian restaurant in tribeca", Google offers far more organic results. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32342947/Screen%20Shot%202013-07-01%20at%201.02.46%20PM.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32342947/Screen%20Shot%2...
andrewjshults 13y ago
The first result for mobile is organic as far as I can tell (it just happens to be a google property when looking for Italian Restaurants in Tribeca). Try switching the query for mexican restaurant and just a few blocks to the west in SoHo (hi Aaron) a menupages result is first. Also, on the mobile front, I believe the quick results are from places and not Zagat, since with the same mexican restaurants query there are a number of places with just ratings and not "Zagat" ratings (you can see this in the blog's screenshot for Olive Garden as well). I actually don't mind this on mobile (but I also generally use something else for finding restaurants) since the majority of restaurant websites are basically impossible to navigate on mobile and all I really need to know is 1) where are they 2) what's their phone number. How organic that database is, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem to be showing specifically paid placements.
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jcampbell1 13y ago
The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients). Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you to Geico or a bunch of lead-gen sites, and no matter what, you will end up at an insurance company that makes the biggest margins. If you really want the cheapest car insurance, you need to find a company that doesn't advertise, and is non-profit, that way your premium is spent buying insurance, not TV ads and Berkshire Hathaway's stock appreciation. Whenever I see a SERP full of ads, I search for something different. When there is nothing but ads, Google is sending you to high-margin crap.
- camus 13y ago
  there is no such things as "internet searches". Because all search engines behave differently and nobody can tell for sure how panda works , except people working on panda. So the rules are decides by whoever develops the search engine. Like there is no such thing as SEO , Google has a monopoly and the rule is pay to play.
- nowarninglabel 13y ago
  I think your hypothesis is quite far off. Can you give an example of an auto insurance company that is a non-profit? I couldn't find any. Perhaps you mean a mutual insurance company? Furthermore, when I bought car insurance last month, Geico gave me the most coverage for the least amount of money (after quite a bit of research), so I also don't agree with your assertation that Google is no help in that regard. While I agree with the concept, as I work for a non-profit and belong to a credit union instead of a bank, I don't think your hypothesis holds without some data to back it up.
  - michaelhoffman 13y ago
    USAA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAA#Returning_profits_to_the_insured http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAA#Returning_profits_to_the_i...), although most people aren't eligible (https://www.usaa.com/inet/pages/pub_eligibility_task_entry https://www.usaa.com/inet/pages/pub_eligibility_task_entry).
lazyjones 13y ago
Do results from https://startpage.com https://startpage.com work for people in the US? I've been using it for a couple of weeks now (I'm in the EU) and it seems like it works very well (it claims to get its results from Google, but without affecting privacy). It shows some display ads, the percentage of screen real estate used is much smaller than for Google itself.
wyck 13y ago
It gets even worse, on some searches I have to scroll a full page down, just to see a result not pushed by a google asset (ads/map/etc). In essence it takes up about 90% of screen space on a large desktop. Example: http://imgur.com/AJtOPkf http://imgur.com/AJtOPkf (this is zoomed down to 65% to capture all of it....) They need to remember that there are alternatives just a click away, and serving too many ads degrades the entire internet.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
This is true of course, Google doesn't make any money on organic search, nobody does, so it gets the short shrift. At Blekko we built a search engine (crawler, extractor, ranker, fetcher, the whole stack) and let people know exactly how we rank things, for users who created an account and logged in they could turn off everything except organic results. We have been moderately successful (we were the first to use a 'masked results' option [1] to show how much better our results were than Google's in contested searches) but there isn't enough outrage about that yet to build a business yet. Most of our business (people who pay us money) comes from folks who either want to figure out how to game Google's results, or want some organic results to create a 'search like experience' much as Google does. When you think about it with only 7% of the page dedicated to organic results that is like 2 or maybe 3 actual search results and the rest of the page is a carefully crafted advertising vehicle. Sort of like a free 'newspaper' which has one article of editorial content and the rest are all ads. You can serve that market quite effectively with a relatively small index (a couple of billion URLs). If you look at Google's financial performance over the years you can see how this evolution has affected their bottom line. Today you see it in declining revenue per click sorts of things. It feels to me as it did when banner ads went from this massive cash cow into something less useful. One thing is true though, the world is changing yet again. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-blekkos-3-engine-monte/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-blekkos-3-en...
- chronic25 13y ago
  I prefer Bing.
- crockstar 13y ago
  Hi Chuck, I'm glad that folks like Blekko are trying to improve the search landscape but do you have any figures to back up the declining revenue per click? I feel as though Google are becoming more and more focussed on profits (evidenced by their (not provided) data hypocrisy, role out of "enhanced campaigns, etc.) but their profits seem to grow[1] and they seem to focus on margins over advertiser or user experience with increasing focus. I'm glad that folks like yourselves are in the market as I say but until someone develops better algos and better results (for the majority of queries) it's unlikely that folks will get angry enough to move or see a viable alternative. In spite of these changes I haven't really seen a decline in Google's market share[2] drop consistently or significantly so I don't really see a change coming any time soon. References: [1] http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2013/01/1-22-2013googleearnings.jpg http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2013/01/1-22-2... [2] http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2275863/Google-Bing-Both-Win-More-Search-Market-Share http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2275863/Google-Bing-Bot... (June, '13) "Google has the identical search share of 66.7 percent when comparing May 2012 and May 2013." vs. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269591/Googles-Search-Market-Share-Drops-as-Bing-Passes-17 http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269591/Googles-Search-... (May, '13)
davidedicillo 13y ago
To be fair searching for "italian restaurants" in San Francisco the first result returned is a Yelp link on mobile, so I guess that the Zagat one wasn't a way to show necessarily a Google owned property. Everything else is the same.
arbuge 13y ago
The rub is that a paid result can be just as useful from the consumer perspective as an organic result. If that's the case, Google will show the paid result every time.
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wicknicks 13y ago
I'm not convinced with the arguments in this post. Auto Mechanic and Italian Food are both vague queries. Auto Mechanic could mean the definition of the term or places around you or even . And its not super hard to get rid of advertisements. If you really want better "organic" results, type in a better query -- "Auto Mechanic, Bay Area" or "Italian Food, New York". I think its almost taken for granted that all search is interactive. If the first try is not precise, refine the query and try again. Its not correct to compare the Google of today with the "organic" search engines of a decade ago. The world, and the web have changed tremendously since. It can be argued that Google is trying to help the consumer by showing multi-faceted search for vague queries (which can potentially narrow search requirements) or provide cues about forming the next query -- and if a company can make money doing that, whats wrong in it?
Afforess 13y ago
I wonder if there is interest in someone building a search site that uses the google custom search API to search. The CSE that Google provides does not include advertising or local results unless specifically requested. The only problem would be that it costs money for large volumes, so you might have to charge or use ads to pay for it.
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lmgftp 13y ago
This article seems to make a point of showcasing Zagat's rating in search above others, somehow indicating that Google is unfairly manipulating search results to it's own gain (as Zagat is Google, Inc. owned). However, there's an important point here to be made, which has been said in numerous antitrust arguments against Google, and that is, "what if the product in No. 1, Google's, is in fact preferred by consumers and therefore is, to use language of the tutorspree authors 'organic'?". It's an interesting question. I find much of the article interesting and of course the screen space dedicated to search is a hot topic, and Google's minimal style still remains in my favor, I just wanted to briefly object to the claim that somehow showing a non-ad Zagat page is "0%" (in the author's numbers) organic search.
thecosas 13y ago
This is making the arguments based on only things "above the fold". There are plenty of people that have dispelled the myth that content NEEDS to be above the fold (1)(2). That said, the implication with Google results is that the higher up on the page the link is, the more relevant that link is to a user's search. In my experience, very few people ever get to the second page of Google Search results. I'm all but certain that if we looked at heatmaps of clicks across all Google search pages, we would see this quite clearly. It's the entire reason that SEO has been an industry at all. It gets more troubling with products like Google Cars (3)(4). It is literally another layer of PPC results specific to cars. I've got to think that other car retailers (including manufacturers) can't be too happy about this. (1) http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/ http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/ (2) http://blog.kissmetrics.com/why-the-fold-is-a-myth/ http://blog.kissmetrics.com/why-the-fold-is-a-myth/ (3) http://www.drivingsales.com/blogs/InvestigativeReporting/2013/04/08/google-cars-it-means-dealers-consumers-industry http://www.drivingsales.com/blogs/InvestigativeReporting/201... (4) http://searchengineland.com/google-tests-new-car-leads-product-126070 http://searchengineland.com/google-tests-new-car-leads-produ...
sologoub 13y ago
Maybe this is a misconception on my part, but isn't local search listings and map info a form of organic search, just derived using different signals for authoritativeness and relevancy, of which proximity is only one variable? If the above is true, Google is dedicating way more real estate to organic than ever. It's just a different form of organic.
- 205guy 13y ago
  I came here to say the same thing. But one of the other comments [1] points out how the "local" listings (Google-owned Zagat) or maps are actually Google's curated business listings, not the business' website. Same goes for Google shopping, Google books, etc, where in popular categories, Google slurps up all the content. On the one hand, that does level the playing field, because little guy doesn't need huge website and SEO to compete against big guy. But fundamentally, everyone is now handing over the control of their data to Google. Let's say you change your business hours (and as a potential customer, I do love Google's display of today's business hours) or phone number, how quickly does Google update all that? Probably very quickly, but it's now out of your hands. And as that comment points out, positioning within those "local" results may be determined by ads (and they are not divided into paid and organic sections)--but we don't always know. Google is definitely trying to blur the line by moving away from the be basic search results listing. I wanted to add that the problem of organic search results is always going to exist for any sort of business (as in both examples of the original article)--as opposed to information. Let's say I'm searching instead for a performance of Beethoven's 9th. Hopefully, people around the internet are linking to good performances, and Google will show me the "best" one. And it will have ads for ringtones and buying CDs of Beethoven's 9th, which is to be expected. But I can be fairly confident the organic part of the results are meaningful. With local search or business search, there is no such thing--Google is not indexing the real world, just what people put on the web. And when there is money on the line, what people put on the web is designed to make them money (SEO, ads, paid reviews, etc.). [1] akharris: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972516
  - Shooti 13y ago
    > Let's say you change your business hours (and as a potential customer, I do love Google's display of today's business hours) or phone number, how quickly does Google update all that? Probably very quickly, but it's now out of your hands. On the contrary, its completely in your hands: http://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/ http://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/ The point of contention is that its a Google controlled affair instead of going through an external standard.
api 13y ago
http://www.duckduckgo.com/ http://www.duckduckgo.com/
dakimov 13y ago
I would use a paid search service with a quality search, no ads, no tracking, and no selling my data to third-parties.
limejuice 13y ago
On desktop, set http://duckduckgo.com http://duckduckgo.com as your search provider. Problem Solved. Even when I !g to see google results, I see 100% organic results because I have Adblock Plus plugin installed on firefox. Problem Solved. Make sure you have 'Hide placeholders of blocked elements' option enabled, otherwise AdBlock will show a blank rectangle where the ads used to be.
- vacri 13y ago
  You're not getting 100% organic results because the author is using screen space as the measure, not returned results (and apparently a custom map doesn't count as an 'organic result'). White space at the sides of ddg? Doesn't count. ddg UI bar at the top? Doesn't count.
mydpy 13y ago
From a network centrality metrics perspective, is there such a thing as "organic search"? Is the premise flawed or is the Page Rank metric considered organic?
achille2 13y ago
I see lots of comments bashing Google, ads are evil, all that. But honestly how many people search for "italian food" on the web expecting global results to be relevant locally? Google is providing exactly what people are looking for when they google for Italian.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
To put it simply, if you're top 3 on organic results, Google is useless for your business. And sometimes not even being top 3. Nowadays you're supposed to buy ads to stay competitive. Google grew so much that it's now a monopolist behemoth, and that's why they're swimming in money. But because they keep all the nerds in love with them, they manage to get zero flak for it.
brudgers 13y ago
I turned on my television and none of the programs were organic. Instead all the content was controlled by my cable provider. I'm beginning to suspect that they just put on those shows to make money off the advertising. It's rather simple. When you type terms into the search box, just imagine the words, "Please show me advertisements for " in front of it.
- donaldc 13y ago
  The organic search results are the loss-leader.
- apalmer 13y ago
  of course, but once you get to a point 50 minutes out of every hour is a commercial, and only 10 minutes is an actual TV show... you start to see a breakdown in the whole business model. Perhaps Google has reached the point where they will soon start experiencing a breakdown that forces them to show more 'content' and less 'ads'. However since the general public cant easily tell what links are paid and what are true searches anymore (and perhaps they dont really even care), maybe this business model will go on for a long time.
  - vacri 13y ago
    That has always puzzled me - why does pay TV have ads within the programs. I can understand outside the programs to round out to half-hour slots, but handing over money to get shows with ads inside them? I just don't understand why people go for these things.
    - ufo 13y ago
      Cable TV didn't have that many ads when it started out. They increased the amount as it became more stablished and more people started beeing invested in it (at least thats the impression I get in my country).
anizan 13y ago
Before Google, people used to use Yahoo directory to find links.The only all encompassing directory in competition now with Google search is Wikipedia (not even its intended purpose) People can use Yelp to find Italian restaurants in San Francisco but try typing the same in Wikipedia. Is there any personalized search engine which lets you choose Yelp/Zagat/Tripadvisor when you type in that keyword? and maybe pull down Google map so Google doesnt feel left out ;)
akos 13y ago
Not a new thing: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10359-60-of-google-visitors-need-to-scroll-to-see-high-value-natural-search-results http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10359-60-of-google-visitors-...
gordaco 13y ago
This is why I block ads.
benradler 13y ago
Google == advertising company Google != search engine
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
gojomo 13y ago
Big dog's gotta eat.
chaz 13y ago
Measuring the usefulness of a page by percentage of screen real estate only seems useful if the user is looking or clicking randomly around the screen. The structure, layout, and clarity of communication are far more important. > 7% is all that’s left for the entrepreneurs and restaurantuers who believed Google over the years when they were told that good business with well structured pages would be able to get in front of potential customers searching the internet. I'm really curious how the author would propose to fix this. Even with all of the other stuff cut away, there are only still 10 blue links to give.
- dublinben 13y ago
  Screen percentage is also incredibly dependent on your screen size. When I replicate their examples, I get far more 'organic' searches on my screen, because I have four times the screen real estate. Google has to delicately balance their advertising with organic results, and this balance works less well at smaller screen sizes.
- lazyjones 13y ago
  > Measuring the usefulness of a page by percentage of screen real estate only seems useful if the user is looking or clicking randomly around the screen. You should tell Google that. They claim to be penalizing web sites with too many ads "above the fold": http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-pages-100601 http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-pag... The bigotry in this has been pointed out by many people already ... Google is basically forcing other sites to use less attractive advertising while offering extremely annoying ads "above the fold" themselves, smells like unfair competition to me.
  - brlewis 13y ago
    Try thinking about this from the user's perspective rather than the site owner's perspective. How do you like it when you click on an ad that looks like it has useful information behind it, and you come to a page that's mostly ads?
    - 13y ago
wxspll 13y ago
I'm happy with Google because no ads while using www.google.com ( not .hk ) in Mainland China where Google quited from. Thanks Google! :)
_jmar777 13y ago
This feels somewhat disingenuous. Naturally a site making it's money off of ads is going to give them an above-the-fold and prominent position. Just scroll down... the value add is in the qualify of the organic results (which is still there), not in the absence of scrolling. If you think the ratio is off, then write an article about it... but this is hardly "killing organic search".
- WalterGR 13y ago
  Naturally a site making it's money off of ads is going to give them an above-the-fold and prominent position. Just scroll down... Google penalizes sites with above-the-fold ads. It doesn't take much at all to earn the penalty. I think that's one reason why people are miffed with Google's excessive ATF advertising on their SERPs.
zokier 13y ago
I just tested this myself, and got 43.8% of organic results (I'm counting the image result preview as organic results), 18.9% of google UI (the bars on top), and 35,2% whitespace. They do not sum to 100% because I just roughly measured stuff at photoshop. Zero ads or curated content on either search, logged in with my personal google profile. I guess adblock and not living in US has some advantages.
dennisgorelik 13y ago
What kind of startup could exploit that situation with Google SERP? My guess would be that some sort of rating site that better answers questions like "what car to buy?" should benefit from Google removing organic results from searches like that.
teeboy 13y ago
Adblock,FTW ! Never seen an ad in several years now.
igorgue 13y ago
scroll down.
igorgue 13y ago
scroll down.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
VMG 13y ago
The numbers are somewhat misleading: they don't add up to 100% because whitespace is counted as well (although not displayed). I personally like the whitespace on the results page. Also the ads on the right side are delineated very liberally - one could argue that the actual area is half as wide.
j45 13y ago
Google is becoming like a newspaper. A connecting point between people, ideas and information. How: 1) Google has steadily moved away from optimally presenting search results which they possess. 2) In being this connecting point, ads increasingly have taken over the space where organic results are published, much like ad space is sold first in a newspaper and articles are squeezed in around it. Everything changes, or does it? Content is king, except finding content is a new king. 3) Google generally has the content we seek - in the form of search results. The results are squeezed around ads. This creates a cognitive cost to separate ads from results, instead of just finding what we need, which was the original promise of Google. This implies, at some point we're giving into reading the ads like they were the results? Users have only ever been interested in search results from a search engine, not ads. In a way, good search results was a promise shared by AltaVista and Google. Being able to easily access them is what is changing. Last year I was irritated enough to build my own search interface, focused on presenting results how I wanted to see them. 4) The cognitive cost had added up to be too much to scan Google constantly to find the one weather, or movie link I have looked at for the last 10 years, and becoming increasingly harder and harder to find. My thoughts come back to the announced shuttering of AltaVista, in wondering whether we really ended up ahead. Google certainly has done things no one else has, getting search so good, and now finding what we want is a little more work. 5) Google is a business, and need a financial engine. As much as advertising currently seems to pay for the internet, I wonder if a day is coming where we're more willing to put our money where our mouth is. It may take some time, for the majority of internet users to have 10+ years of online experience of doing the same searches and finding them harder to find. What to do? I feel like brushing up my custom search interface and use it a little more.
mattbarrie 13y ago
Panda and Penguin are euphemisms for Google A/B testing revenue.
nostraspamus 13y ago
To reduce the amount of useless clutter that Google displays in search results, try verbatim mode. You can turn on verbatim mode on the search results page. Click on the Search Tools menu, then look in the All Results menu for the Verbatim option. The verbatim option tells Google to use all your search terms, as-is, and (at least at present) the search results are much less cluttered. To always use verbatim mode, remove the search terms from the URL in the address bar (leaving intact the other parameters that turn on verbatim mode) and create a bookmark. Don't tell Google about this feature... I depend on it!
kenster07 13y ago
I disagree with the premise. "Organic" search will not exist, barring a radically new business model. Any search engine with the resources to produce good search results must carry auction-based advertising in order to fund the quality of their results. Good luck finding that business model, and being able to reap the profits from it.
sengstrom 13y ago
Those percentages don't add up to 100%. Seems disingenious to count the white space in the display just to make a point.
znowi 13y ago
Google Search was totally awesome when it first came out. Disrupted the whole industry and set new standards of search on the web. Now I find myself longing for a new company and a new disruption of what is essentially Google monopoly.
islon 13y ago
You either die a hero or live long enough to became the villain. At least we have duck duck go.
fastball 13y ago
This is absurd. First, the author factored the screen space taken up by the google search bar into his calculations. Really? You want to press the back button each time you want a new search? And don't get me started on the fact that the author factored in the goddamn page margins as part of his percentage. Secondly: the 7% of the page that is taken up by a map? Yeah, those are also organic results. In fact, they are probably more helpful to most people than the author's version of organic results (just links to websites). Thirdly: after you scroll down (takes about 0.1 seconds) the percentages change significantly, as the entire box of sponsored results is no longer there. So. If we eliminate the search bar and the margins, and we include the map in our percentage, and we scroll down a tad so that the sponsored ads disappear, you're looking at a page that is about 70% organic results. FINALLY AND MOST IMPORTANTLY. Google did not become popular because it showed the highest PERCENTAGE of organic search results per page. It won the search wars because IT'S RESULTS ARE MORE RELEVANT THAN OTHER SEARCH ENGINES. Percentages DO NOT affect the relevance of google's results. It's all about relevance.
pizu 13y ago
And this is a further proof: https://www.google.co.uk/flights https://www.google.co.uk/flights

535 points by akharris 13y ago

DuckDuckGo is far less cluttered, which makes sense considering they have less things to push aside from the results: http://i.imgur.com/OnBJHkS.png http://i.imgur.com/OnBJHkS.png

GuiA 13y ago
In light of "designy" things like this, and other "ideological" things that have transpired in the past few weeks, I've been forcing myself to use DuckDuckGo. It's been about a month now, and I find the results terrible. I want to love it, but the first 10 results are pretty much never what I want. Sadly, Google still performs better on this front for me. If anyone has tips to make it better, I'd be very happy to hear them.
- antjanus 13y ago
  Bing is a little bit better in terms of screen real estate. They seem to push the top organic results at the top of the page, and put local results in between the top 2-3 and the next 6 results. There are barely any ads. Also, after a year of non-stop use, i can tell you right now that Bing predicts what I'm looking for far better than Google ever did.
  - psbp 13y ago
    Are we using the same bing? The searches I just tested returned just as many bing-centric results as google does.
- Ziomislaw 13y ago
  I believe it might be because DDG is not Google. What works on google might not work the same in DDG. How long have you been using google? Probably long time. During this time you (unconsiously) learned how to ask questions "google way", now you need to learn to quack :p I also found that DDG sometimes (not very often) does not find what I am looking for. Mostly it is because I know nothing of the subject ie. using a description of a "thing" I am looking for instead of its name, etc. - theese are the things google is better at. Regardless, if you find such query than please submit it to ddg, they are very responsive and results do get better.
  - Afforess 13y ago
    >How long have you been using google? Probably long time. During this time you (unconsiously) learned how to ask questions "google way", now you need to learn to quack :p I understand this, but most of us are looking for an alternative to Google and not a completely different search engine.
    - yen223 13y ago
      Google with Adblock does the trick.
      - hga 13y ago
        "Out of the box" I don't find that to be true, at least not with Linux 32 bit Firefox 21.0 and Chrome 27.0.1453.93 just now. Same results for auto mechanic and Italian restaurant, except my local market is too small for anyone to have bought ads for the latter. I assume I could configure Adblock Plus to hide the Google ads, but at least for me and what I normally search for they're not really an issue.
    - dotmanish 13y ago
      Take a look at StartPage (http://startpage.com http://startpage.com) - similar Privacy Policy.
      - Afforess 13y ago
        I did, but it still includes local results (it thinks I am in New York City). I signed up for a Google API account and tried the Google custom search engine and searched for "pizza restaurants" and received different results than with Startpage. Startpage tried to sell me NYC pizza. Google Custom Search: http://i.imgur.com/PLZ79Vk.png?1 http://i.imgur.com/PLZ79Vk.png?1 Startpage: http://i.imgur.com/5ui5LQc.png http://i.imgur.com/5ui5LQc.png
- api 13y ago
  I've found DDG to be better at finding obscure content, and the Goog to be better at finding what I call "canonical" content. For example, if I search for "binary tree" I probably want Wikipedia followed maybe by StackExchange. Google does that, while DDG sends me deep into the netherworld.
  - PanickedOmlette 13y ago
    Yeah, sadly that happens sometimes. I revert to Google (with bang syntax) when I am looking for something programming related and want a lot of results from stackoverflow. However, DDG is definitely better at finding some things. I recently searched for gentoo+postgresql related stuff and got highly relevant results, which weren't in Google's SERP.
    - yaddayadda 13y ago
      If you want just stackoverflow results and are already using bang syntax to get them from Google, then you should just switch from !g to !so.
      - ufo 13y ago
        An additional bonus of "!so" is that works with stack overflow search syntax like tag names between brackets.
  - yaddayadda 13y ago
    One awesome thing about DDG is their !bang searches. It won't automate an unknown search, but if you know the first thing you're going to want is the Wikipedia entry you just search ["binary tree" !w]; for related StackExchange questions ["binary tree" !so]; you can even do a straight goggle search ["binary tree" !g]. For the available !bangs check out - https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
    - bad_user 13y ago
      You don't need DDG for that, when you can use Firefox (or Chrome). All you need to do on a website with a search box is to right-click on that search box -> Add Keyword for this Search... and then add a shortcut. The cool thing about it is that it is extensible. You don't need to settle for the fixed "bangs" that DDG provides. For example, I have a "dex" shortcut for searching an online dictionary of my native language. Also, it takes less time to add a shortcut of interest than it is to read the DDG documentation page to find out the right bang for you. If you care about privacy, then this is also a no-brainer, since you don't go through a third-party server anymore.
- limejuice 13y ago
  I've been using DDG for about 1 year now, and I haven't missed google at all. The few times I don't find what I want, I !g to see google results, but they haven't seemed any better. I find as more subject specific sites have grown, that generic search like ddg and google aren't as important to me. I do more searches on sites like stackoverflow, yelp, maps.google.com, tripadivsor, etc. than ddg.
  - yaddayadda 13y ago
    I've been doing the Duck about that long now, and I miss google enough that !g gets used daily. But, I also try to do all of my initial searches, even !g, !so, !w, !gi, and !a through DDG. And, I've set my Firefox address bar to default to DDG.
- runn1ng 13y ago
  Try startpage https://startpage.com/ https://startpage.com/ It's basically google, but without the tracking. (Or so they say.)
Kylekramer 13y ago
Not exactly a fair comparison considering you are using some sort of software to block the ad I get on that search. I only get three search results on my screen, if you consider the Wikipedia info and ad to not be organic, very similar to Google search. And frankly, those search results are useless. If I am searching for auto mechanic, it is highly unlikely I am doing so to know the definition of an auto mechanic. Google may be creepy in its tracking, but at least by tracking me they can point me to a mechanic in my area.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  > Google may be creepy in its tracking, but at least by tracking me they can point me to a mechanic in my area. Surely you mean "at least by tracking me they can point me to a mechanic in my area without having to go through the trouble of specifying the area in the search box". You almost make it sound as if Google is providing you service that is worth being tracked over. They're not. It's perfectly possible to find what you're looking for without the search engine knowing who or where you are. The only thing you get in exchange for being tracked is the "convenience" of not having to type "New York" after your query.
WayneDB 13y ago
I've been using StartPage.com which another HNer had recommended. I like it better than DDG because it seems faster and it also uses Google's search results instead of Bing's.
fuzzywalrus 13y ago
I've really tried to make a go of getting out of the google verse. I set DuckDuckGo as my default but it was interfering with my ability to work, when searching for code. I'm using Bing as my default but occasionally I still use google for searching some snippets.

sctt311 13y ago

Great article! Sad in a way how Google continues to dominate and impose it's will on us.

jordanthoms 13y ago
Yeah, fancy showing relevant local results when you search for a Restaurant! The bastards!

Eclyps 13y ago

For some reason I was surprised to see bing's results even more cluttered and useless... http://i.imgur.com/kuRTMhO.png http://i.imgur.com/kuRTMhO.png You would think that bing would be trying to win the popularity contest by actually providing more relevant searches in the short term and then expanding ads in the future...

estel 13y ago
I'm not sure why Google's results might be said to be /useless/? There's definitely an interesting argument to be made about Google using a monopolistic position in search to cross-promote some of their other products (local, ads, maps), but the OP's examples seem to show results that quite likely exactly what the user would have been searching for. I guess what I'm saying is that pure organic search isn't necessarily the optimal way for a user to find the information they're looking for.

andrewljohnson 13y ago

I'm typically a Google fanboy, but spot on. Here's a search for sushi for me: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3epmld2ffqzg3f/Screen%20Shot%202013-07-01%20at%209.38.09%20AM.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3epmld2ffqzg3f/Screen%20Shot%2020... It's like full circle back to Yahoo. Maybe this is a result of listening to the data too much, and not depending on the greater vision enough. Or maybe it's the future and you're gonna love it.

zalew 13y ago
mine is even worse, because google apparently has trouble with me not being in the USA http://i.imgur.com/sQ5lue3.png http://i.imgur.com/sQ5lue3.png
- hnriot 13y ago
  What did you expect it to show you? It seems like a decent result to me. Possibly google doesn't know any sushi restaurants near you in Warsaw.
  - zalew 13y ago
    pointless zip-code form.
    - bdegman 13y ago
      It's not pointless if you are looking for a place to eat sushi. You're performing a hypothetical search for something that you aren't actually looking for and then calling the results pointless.
      - Wilya 13y ago
        Google can pinpoint your location very accurately, and they are usually quite agressive in promoting local results (including for tech queries, which is a pretty bad idea), yet they ask people in Poland: "In which US city are you ?". I find that quite funny, to be honest.

philhippus 13y ago

Let them greed themselves into irrelevance I say. That leaves the door open for some YC startup to implement some type of peer to peer search protocol that will leave google in the dust.

philippelh 13y ago
It remembers me this http://yacy.net/en/ http://yacy.net/en/

ChrisAntaki 13y ago

There is a way to increase the percentage of organic search results on a Google page, with relative ease. Just scroll down.

goostavos 13y ago
I mean, really, what is the article complaining about here? The most often clicked on organic search results appear above the fold. If you need more, scroll down a bit. Maybe I'm the minority, but if what I'm looking for isn't one of the first few results, I modify my query. Google is showing the stuff that makes it money, and the organic stuff we're most likely to need. And at the end of the day, what we're talking about is having to scroll down on a page. Faux blog outrage.
- ChrisAntaki 13y ago
  Agreed! Personally, I use DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons, but I have a ton of respect for Google. The blog post is complaining about some trivial stuff, that I'm sure Google has spent (hundreds of) thousands analyzing.
- estel 13y ago
  Indeed, I wasn't really aware that the "fold" was really much of an issue any more with modern web design. Users expect to, and do, scroll down; it's no big deal :/
jasey 13y ago
If you have ever looked at a heatmap of where users scroll down to on a given page. It will clearly show you that the prime realestate is above the fold (before you start scrolling)

ZanderEarth32 13y ago

While this is true, users are still clicking organic results much more often than the paid options even though the organic results real estate keeps shrinking[1]. Even with the shrinking organic screen space, the first three results still capture the vast majority of the clicks, so results 4-10 receive fewer clicks regardless of the amount of space given to organic results. I'd like to see a study where organic results 1-10 all appear on the page above the fold, giving users the ability to see all the results without having to scroll and measure click through rates at that time. 1. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2200730/Organic-vs.-Paid-Search-Results-Organic-Wins-94-of-Time http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2200730/Organic-vs.-Pai...

marban 13y ago

goto.com anyone?

soundgecko 13y ago

There's the other problem of decreasing contrast and lack of borders separating the last ad and first organic search result. http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/ http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional... A few years ago this was the style http://www.ismoip.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Screenshot1.png http://www.ismoip.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Screen... Before that http://cdn.userstyles.org/style_screenshot_thumbnails/58617_after.jpeg http://cdn.userstyles.org/style_screenshot_thumbnails/58617_... Now http://i.imgur.com/Wmdd0.png http://i.imgur.com/Wmdd0.png Some of those keywords are worth tens of dollars per click so no wonder,the colors have been A/B optmized to get the most clicks from people not knowing they are ads. Comparison: Google: #fff7ec Bing: #f9fcf7 Yahoo: #fafaff DuckDuckGo: (255,212,0,0.18) Not to say that Bing, Yahoo etc. are much better but I expect more from the "Do No Evil" Google rather than increasing the next quarter's earnings instead of targeting older people and people with bad monitors and hurting people who did a lot of good work to come in the first few in organic results but don't and/or can't pay Google for expensive ads. Also, Bing and the rest continue to mostly lose money and they can't afford to separate ads while the big guy continues to reduce the difference between ads and search results. "Study:Contrast sensitivity gradually decreases with age" http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphologic=0 http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphol...

hncommenter13 13y ago
Note that the FTC agrees with you and recently made an announcement[1] regarding the shading of the ad result box, among other requirements for search engines. The study the FTC cites[2] indicates that fully half of individuals didn't even realize the page contained ads. [1] http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/06/searchengine.shtm http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/06/searchengine.shtm [2] http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results

programminggeek 13y ago

What you don't understand is Google's been doing this for almost a decade now. It's about profit optimization while not pissing off your users, or sometimes helping them even. A paid result can be a useful thing and might even be better than an organic result in many cases, but both have their pitfalls and it's not surprising for them to keep going this route more and more. Google is a company, not a nonprofit. They are in it for the money. Why is anyone surprised?

notsosmart 13y ago
Not surprised, but they have 65% share of search in the US, so it's a disturbing trend for high quality sites ranking organically.

saalweachter 13y ago

Nit: this article is really criticizing a UI change which makes local results more prominent (in that they take over the entire page). The local results at the top of the page when you search for "Italian restaurants" are all still organic. In fact, whenever there's a map on the right-and side of the page, it's displacing ads. Now, you can be against Google ever making a UI change, or even against Google showing different results for "Italian restaurants" in New York and Chicago, but this doesn't really have anything to do with "organic" search results.

300bps 13y ago
You may have missed this part of the article: The scariest part of this is that, if you sell something using the internet, regardless of whether or not you see yourself as a “local" business - or think you’re competing with Google - Google sees you as competition. Searching for “Camera" or “Buy a Dress Shirt" gets you a nearly identical split of screen real estate as that of “local" searches.
akharris 13y ago
The issue there is that the "organic" results you're talking about that show in either the map or the carousel aren't organic at all - they're google local listings. As a restaurant, you are now incentivized to a) buy ads to get traffic from the ad units b) give google data (effectively building a whole other website) through google+/local. You are very much being de-incentivized from investing in a page that is outside of google's universe, because you're only shot there is pure organic, which matters less and less.
- 3825 13y ago
  I find this interesting. I didn't think of Google local listing as not organic but I did the search in the article[1] and sure enough it takes a lot of the real estate. Perhaps, Google could publish a standard way to write your own self-hosted Places page? We will still have questions on how the ranking will work and whether Google will prioritize its own Google+ place pages over self-hosted place pages but I think this would be a start. What do you think? [1] http://i.imgur.com/Bf74Dd7.png http://i.imgur.com/Bf74Dd7.png

jmarbach 13y ago

I agree with the arguments here on the whole. However, if you declare a local search on your own, by simply including "italian restaurant in tribeca", Google offers far more organic results. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32342947/Screen%20Shot%202013-07-01%20at%201.02.46%20PM.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32342947/Screen%20Shot%2...

andrewjshults 13y ago

The first result for mobile is organic as far as I can tell (it just happens to be a google property when looking for Italian Restaurants in Tribeca). Try switching the query for mexican restaurant and just a few blocks to the west in SoHo (hi Aaron) a menupages result is first. Also, on the mobile front, I believe the quick results are from places and not Zagat, since with the same mexican restaurants query there are a number of places with just ratings and not "Zagat" ratings (you can see this in the blog's screenshot for Olive Garden as well). I actually don't mind this on mobile (but I also generally use something else for finding restaurants) since the majority of restaurant websites are basically impossible to navigate on mobile and all I really need to know is 1) where are they 2) what's their phone number. How organic that database is, I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem to be showing specifically paid placements.

deleted 13y ago

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jcampbell1 13y ago

The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients). Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you to Geico or a bunch of lead-gen sites, and no matter what, you will end up at an insurance company that makes the biggest margins. If you really want the cheapest car insurance, you need to find a company that doesn't advertise, and is non-profit, that way your premium is spent buying insurance, not TV ads and Berkshire Hathaway's stock appreciation. Whenever I see a SERP full of ads, I search for something different. When there is nothing but ads, Google is sending you to high-margin crap.

camus 13y ago
there is no such things as "internet searches". Because all search engines behave differently and nobody can tell for sure how panda works , except people working on panda. So the rules are decides by whoever develops the search engine. Like there is no such thing as SEO , Google has a monopoly and the rule is pay to play.
nowarninglabel 13y ago
I think your hypothesis is quite far off. Can you give an example of an auto insurance company that is a non-profit? I couldn't find any. Perhaps you mean a mutual insurance company? Furthermore, when I bought car insurance last month, Geico gave me the most coverage for the least amount of money (after quite a bit of research), so I also don't agree with your assertation that Google is no help in that regard. While I agree with the concept, as I work for a non-profit and belong to a credit union instead of a bank, I don't think your hypothesis holds without some data to back it up.
- michaelhoffman 13y ago
  USAA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAA#Returning_profits_to_the_insured http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAA#Returning_profits_to_the_i...), although most people aren't eligible (https://www.usaa.com/inet/pages/pub_eligibility_task_entry https://www.usaa.com/inet/pages/pub_eligibility_task_entry).

lazyjones 13y ago

Do results from https://startpage.com https://startpage.com work for people in the US? I've been using it for a couple of weeks now (I'm in the EU) and it seems like it works very well (it claims to get its results from Google, but without affecting privacy). It shows some display ads, the percentage of screen real estate used is much smaller than for Google itself.

wyck 13y ago

It gets even worse, on some searches I have to scroll a full page down, just to see a result not pushed by a google asset (ads/map/etc). In essence it takes up about 90% of screen space on a large desktop. Example: http://imgur.com/AJtOPkf http://imgur.com/AJtOPkf (this is zoomed down to 65% to capture all of it....) They need to remember that there are alternatives just a click away, and serving too many ads degrades the entire internet.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

This is true of course, Google doesn't make any money on organic search, nobody does, so it gets the short shrift. At Blekko we built a search engine (crawler, extractor, ranker, fetcher, the whole stack) and let people know exactly how we rank things, for users who created an account and logged in they could turn off everything except organic results. We have been moderately successful (we were the first to use a 'masked results' option [1] to show how much better our results were than Google's in contested searches) but there isn't enough outrage about that yet to build a business yet. Most of our business (people who pay us money) comes from folks who either want to figure out how to game Google's results, or want some organic results to create a 'search like experience' much as Google does. When you think about it with only 7% of the page dedicated to organic results that is like 2 or maybe 3 actual search results and the rest of the page is a carefully crafted advertising vehicle. Sort of like a free 'newspaper' which has one article of editorial content and the rest are all ads. You can serve that market quite effectively with a relatively small index (a couple of billion URLs). If you look at Google's financial performance over the years you can see how this evolution has affected their bottom line. Today you see it in declining revenue per click sorts of things. It feels to me as it did when banner ads went from this massive cash cow into something less useful. One thing is true though, the world is changing yet again. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-blekkos-3-engine-monte/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-blekkos-3-en...

chronic25 13y ago
I prefer Bing.
crockstar 13y ago
Hi Chuck, I'm glad that folks like Blekko are trying to improve the search landscape but do you have any figures to back up the declining revenue per click? I feel as though Google are becoming more and more focussed on profits (evidenced by their (not provided) data hypocrisy, role out of "enhanced campaigns, etc.) but their profits seem to grow[1] and they seem to focus on margins over advertiser or user experience with increasing focus. I'm glad that folks like yourselves are in the market as I say but until someone develops better algos and better results (for the majority of queries) it's unlikely that folks will get angry enough to move or see a viable alternative. In spite of these changes I haven't really seen a decline in Google's market share[2] drop consistently or significantly so I don't really see a change coming any time soon. References: [1] http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2013/01/1-22-2013googleearnings.jpg http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2013/01/1-22-2... [2] http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2275863/Google-Bing-Both-Win-More-Search-Market-Share http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2275863/Google-Bing-Bot... (June, '13) "Google has the identical search share of 66.7 percent when comparing May 2012 and May 2013." vs. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269591/Googles-Search-Market-Share-Drops-as-Bing-Passes-17 http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269591/Googles-Search-... (May, '13)

davidedicillo 13y ago

To be fair searching for "italian restaurants" in San Francisco the first result returned is a Yelp link on mobile, so I guess that the Zagat one wasn't a way to show necessarily a Google owned property. Everything else is the same.

arbuge 13y ago

The rub is that a paid result can be just as useful from the consumer perspective as an organic result. If that's the case, Google will show the paid result every time.

deleted 13y ago

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wicknicks 13y ago

I'm not convinced with the arguments in this post. Auto Mechanic and Italian Food are both vague queries. Auto Mechanic could mean the definition of the term or places around you or even . And its not super hard to get rid of advertisements. If you really want better "organic" results, type in a better query -- "Auto Mechanic, Bay Area" or "Italian Food, New York". I think its almost taken for granted that all search is interactive. If the first try is not precise, refine the query and try again. Its not correct to compare the Google of today with the "organic" search engines of a decade ago. The world, and the web have changed tremendously since. It can be argued that Google is trying to help the consumer by showing multi-faceted search for vague queries (which can potentially narrow search requirements) or provide cues about forming the next query -- and if a company can make money doing that, whats wrong in it?

Afforess 13y ago

I wonder if there is interest in someone building a search site that uses the google custom search API to search. The CSE that Google provides does not include advertising or local results unless specifically requested. The only problem would be that it costs money for large volumes, so you might have to charge or use ads to pay for it.

deleted 13y ago

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lmgftp 13y ago

This article seems to make a point of showcasing Zagat's rating in search above others, somehow indicating that Google is unfairly manipulating search results to it's own gain (as Zagat is Google, Inc. owned). However, there's an important point here to be made, which has been said in numerous antitrust arguments against Google, and that is, "what if the product in No. 1, Google's, is in fact preferred by consumers and therefore is, to use language of the tutorspree authors 'organic'?". It's an interesting question. I find much of the article interesting and of course the screen space dedicated to search is a hot topic, and Google's minimal style still remains in my favor, I just wanted to briefly object to the claim that somehow showing a non-ad Zagat page is "0%" (in the author's numbers) organic search.

thecosas 13y ago

This is making the arguments based on only things "above the fold". There are plenty of people that have dispelled the myth that content NEEDS to be above the fold (1)(2). That said, the implication with Google results is that the higher up on the page the link is, the more relevant that link is to a user's search. In my experience, very few people ever get to the second page of Google Search results. I'm all but certain that if we looked at heatmaps of clicks across all Google search pages, we would see this quite clearly. It's the entire reason that SEO has been an industry at all. It gets more troubling with products like Google Cars (3)(4). It is literally another layer of PPC results specific to cars. I've got to think that other car retailers (including manufacturers) can't be too happy about this. (1) http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/ http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/ (2) http://blog.kissmetrics.com/why-the-fold-is-a-myth/ http://blog.kissmetrics.com/why-the-fold-is-a-myth/ (3) http://www.drivingsales.com/blogs/InvestigativeReporting/2013/04/08/google-cars-it-means-dealers-consumers-industry http://www.drivingsales.com/blogs/InvestigativeReporting/201... (4) http://searchengineland.com/google-tests-new-car-leads-product-126070 http://searchengineland.com/google-tests-new-car-leads-produ...

sologoub 13y ago

Maybe this is a misconception on my part, but isn't local search listings and map info a form of organic search, just derived using different signals for authoritativeness and relevancy, of which proximity is only one variable? If the above is true, Google is dedicating way more real estate to organic than ever. It's just a different form of organic.

205guy 13y ago
I came here to say the same thing. But one of the other comments [1] points out how the "local" listings (Google-owned Zagat) or maps are actually Google's curated business listings, not the business' website. Same goes for Google shopping, Google books, etc, where in popular categories, Google slurps up all the content. On the one hand, that does level the playing field, because little guy doesn't need huge website and SEO to compete against big guy. But fundamentally, everyone is now handing over the control of their data to Google. Let's say you change your business hours (and as a potential customer, I do love Google's display of today's business hours) or phone number, how quickly does Google update all that? Probably very quickly, but it's now out of your hands. And as that comment points out, positioning within those "local" results may be determined by ads (and they are not divided into paid and organic sections)--but we don't always know. Google is definitely trying to blur the line by moving away from the be basic search results listing. I wanted to add that the problem of organic search results is always going to exist for any sort of business (as in both examples of the original article)--as opposed to information. Let's say I'm searching instead for a performance of Beethoven's 9th. Hopefully, people around the internet are linking to good performances, and Google will show me the "best" one. And it will have ads for ringtones and buying CDs of Beethoven's 9th, which is to be expected. But I can be fairly confident the organic part of the results are meaningful. With local search or business search, there is no such thing--Google is not indexing the real world, just what people put on the web. And when there is money on the line, what people put on the web is designed to make them money (SEO, ads, paid reviews, etc.). [1] akharris: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972516
- Shooti 13y ago
  > Let's say you change your business hours (and as a potential customer, I do love Google's display of today's business hours) or phone number, how quickly does Google update all that? Probably very quickly, but it's now out of your hands. On the contrary, its completely in your hands: http://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/ http://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/ The point of contention is that its a Google controlled affair instead of going through an external standard.

api 13y ago

http://www.duckduckgo.com/ http://www.duckduckgo.com/

dakimov 13y ago

I would use a paid search service with a quality search, no ads, no tracking, and no selling my data to third-parties.

limejuice 13y ago

On desktop, set http://duckduckgo.com http://duckduckgo.com as your search provider. Problem Solved. Even when I !g to see google results, I see 100% organic results because I have Adblock Plus plugin installed on firefox. Problem Solved. Make sure you have 'Hide placeholders of blocked elements' option enabled, otherwise AdBlock will show a blank rectangle where the ads used to be.

vacri 13y ago
You're not getting 100% organic results because the author is using screen space as the measure, not returned results (and apparently a custom map doesn't count as an 'organic result'). White space at the sides of ddg? Doesn't count. ddg UI bar at the top? Doesn't count.

mydpy 13y ago

From a network centrality metrics perspective, is there such a thing as "organic search"? Is the premise flawed or is the Page Rank metric considered organic?

achille2 13y ago

I see lots of comments bashing Google, ads are evil, all that. But honestly how many people search for "italian food" on the web expecting global results to be relevant locally? Google is providing exactly what people are looking for when they google for Italian.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

To put it simply, if you're top 3 on organic results, Google is useless for your business. And sometimes not even being top 3. Nowadays you're supposed to buy ads to stay competitive. Google grew so much that it's now a monopolist behemoth, and that's why they're swimming in money. But because they keep all the nerds in love with them, they manage to get zero flak for it.

brudgers 13y ago

I turned on my television and none of the programs were organic. Instead all the content was controlled by my cable provider. I'm beginning to suspect that they just put on those shows to make money off the advertising. It's rather simple. When you type terms into the search box, just imagine the words, "Please show me advertisements for " in front of it.

donaldc 13y ago
The organic search results are the loss-leader.
apalmer 13y ago
of course, but once you get to a point 50 minutes out of every hour is a commercial, and only 10 minutes is an actual TV show... you start to see a breakdown in the whole business model. Perhaps Google has reached the point where they will soon start experiencing a breakdown that forces them to show more 'content' and less 'ads'. However since the general public cant easily tell what links are paid and what are true searches anymore (and perhaps they dont really even care), maybe this business model will go on for a long time.
- vacri 13y ago
  That has always puzzled me - why does pay TV have ads within the programs. I can understand outside the programs to round out to half-hour slots, but handing over money to get shows with ads inside them? I just don't understand why people go for these things.
  - ufo 13y ago
    Cable TV didn't have that many ads when it started out. They increased the amount as it became more stablished and more people started beeing invested in it (at least thats the impression I get in my country).

anizan 13y ago

Before Google, people used to use Yahoo directory to find links.The only all encompassing directory in competition now with Google search is Wikipedia (not even its intended purpose) People can use Yelp to find Italian restaurants in San Francisco but try typing the same in Wikipedia. Is there any personalized search engine which lets you choose Yelp/Zagat/Tripadvisor when you type in that keyword? and maybe pull down Google map so Google doesnt feel left out ;)

akos 13y ago

Not a new thing: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10359-60-of-google-visitors-need-to-scroll-to-see-high-value-natural-search-results http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10359-60-of-google-visitors-...

gordaco 13y ago

This is why I block ads.

benradler 13y ago

Google == advertising company Google != search engine

deleted 13y ago

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gojomo 13y ago

Big dog's gotta eat.

chaz 13y ago

Measuring the usefulness of a page by percentage of screen real estate only seems useful if the user is looking or clicking randomly around the screen. The structure, layout, and clarity of communication are far more important. > 7% is all that’s left for the entrepreneurs and restaurantuers who believed Google over the years when they were told that good business with well structured pages would be able to get in front of potential customers searching the internet. I'm really curious how the author would propose to fix this. Even with all of the other stuff cut away, there are only still 10 blue links to give.

dublinben 13y ago
Screen percentage is also incredibly dependent on your screen size. When I replicate their examples, I get far more 'organic' searches on my screen, because I have four times the screen real estate. Google has to delicately balance their advertising with organic results, and this balance works less well at smaller screen sizes.
lazyjones 13y ago
> Measuring the usefulness of a page by percentage of screen real estate only seems useful if the user is looking or clicking randomly around the screen. You should tell Google that. They claim to be penalizing web sites with too many ads "above the fold": http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-pages-100601 http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-pag... The bigotry in this has been pointed out by many people already ... Google is basically forcing other sites to use less attractive advertising while offering extremely annoying ads "above the fold" themselves, smells like unfair competition to me.
- brlewis 13y ago
  Try thinking about this from the user's perspective rather than the site owner's perspective. How do you like it when you click on an ad that looks like it has useful information behind it, and you come to a page that's mostly ads?
  - 13y ago

wxspll 13y ago

I'm happy with Google because no ads while using www.google.com ( not .hk ) in Mainland China where Google quited from. Thanks Google! :)

_jmar777 13y ago

This feels somewhat disingenuous. Naturally a site making it's money off of ads is going to give them an above-the-fold and prominent position. Just scroll down... the value add is in the qualify of the organic results (which is still there), not in the absence of scrolling. If you think the ratio is off, then write an article about it... but this is hardly "killing organic search".

WalterGR 13y ago
Naturally a site making it's money off of ads is going to give them an above-the-fold and prominent position. Just scroll down... Google penalizes sites with above-the-fold ads. It doesn't take much at all to earn the penalty. I think that's one reason why people are miffed with Google's excessive ATF advertising on their SERPs.

zokier 13y ago

I just tested this myself, and got 43.8% of organic results (I'm counting the image result preview as organic results), 18.9% of google UI (the bars on top), and 35,2% whitespace. They do not sum to 100% because I just roughly measured stuff at photoshop. Zero ads or curated content on either search, logged in with my personal google profile. I guess adblock and not living in US has some advantages.

dennisgorelik 13y ago

What kind of startup could exploit that situation with Google SERP? My guess would be that some sort of rating site that better answers questions like "what car to buy?" should benefit from Google removing organic results from searches like that.

teeboy 13y ago

Adblock,FTW ! Never seen an ad in several years now.

igorgue 13y ago

scroll down.

igorgue 13y ago

scroll down.

deleted 13y ago

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VMG 13y ago

The numbers are somewhat misleading: they don't add up to 100% because whitespace is counted as well (although not displayed). I personally like the whitespace on the results page. Also the ads on the right side are delineated very liberally - one could argue that the actual area is half as wide.

j45 13y ago

Google is becoming like a newspaper. A connecting point between people, ideas and information. How: 1) Google has steadily moved away from optimally presenting search results which they possess. 2) In being this connecting point, ads increasingly have taken over the space where organic results are published, much like ad space is sold first in a newspaper and articles are squeezed in around it. Everything changes, or does it? Content is king, except finding content is a new king. 3) Google generally has the content we seek - in the form of search results. The results are squeezed around ads. This creates a cognitive cost to separate ads from results, instead of just finding what we need, which was the original promise of Google. This implies, at some point we're giving into reading the ads like they were the results? Users have only ever been interested in search results from a search engine, not ads. In a way, good search results was a promise shared by AltaVista and Google. Being able to easily access them is what is changing. Last year I was irritated enough to build my own search interface, focused on presenting results how I wanted to see them. 4) The cognitive cost had added up to be too much to scan Google constantly to find the one weather, or movie link I have looked at for the last 10 years, and becoming increasingly harder and harder to find. My thoughts come back to the announced shuttering of AltaVista, in wondering whether we really ended up ahead. Google certainly has done things no one else has, getting search so good, and now finding what we want is a little more work. 5) Google is a business, and need a financial engine. As much as advertising currently seems to pay for the internet, I wonder if a day is coming where we're more willing to put our money where our mouth is. It may take some time, for the majority of internet users to have 10+ years of online experience of doing the same searches and finding them harder to find. What to do? I feel like brushing up my custom search interface and use it a little more.

mattbarrie 13y ago

Panda and Penguin are euphemisms for Google A/B testing revenue.

nostraspamus 13y ago

To reduce the amount of useless clutter that Google displays in search results, try verbatim mode. You can turn on verbatim mode on the search results page. Click on the Search Tools menu, then look in the All Results menu for the Verbatim option. The verbatim option tells Google to use all your search terms, as-is, and (at least at present) the search results are much less cluttered. To always use verbatim mode, remove the search terms from the URL in the address bar (leaving intact the other parameters that turn on verbatim mode) and create a bookmark. Don't tell Google about this feature... I depend on it!

kenster07 13y ago

I disagree with the premise. "Organic" search will not exist, barring a radically new business model. Any search engine with the resources to produce good search results must carry auction-based advertising in order to fund the quality of their results. Good luck finding that business model, and being able to reap the profits from it.

sengstrom 13y ago

Those percentages don't add up to 100%. Seems disingenious to count the white space in the display just to make a point.

znowi 13y ago

Google Search was totally awesome when it first came out. Disrupted the whole industry and set new standards of search on the web. Now I find myself longing for a new company and a new disruption of what is essentially Google monopoly.

islon 13y ago

You either die a hero or live long enough to became the villain. At least we have duck duck go.

fastball 13y ago

This is absurd. First, the author factored the screen space taken up by the google search bar into his calculations. Really? You want to press the back button each time you want a new search? And don't get me started on the fact that the author factored in the goddamn page margins as part of his percentage. Secondly: the 7% of the page that is taken up by a map? Yeah, those are also organic results. In fact, they are probably more helpful to most people than the author's version of organic results (just links to websites). Thirdly: after you scroll down (takes about 0.1 seconds) the percentages change significantly, as the entire box of sponsored results is no longer there. So. If we eliminate the search bar and the margins, and we include the map in our percentage, and we scroll down a tad so that the sponsored ads disappear, you're looking at a page that is about 70% organic results. FINALLY AND MOST IMPORTANTLY. Google did not become popular because it showed the highest PERCENTAGE of organic search results per page. It won the search wars because IT'S RESULTS ARE MORE RELEVANT THAN OTHER SEARCH ENGINES. Percentages DO NOT affect the relevance of google's results. It's all about relevance.

pizu 13y ago

And this is a further proof: https://www.google.co.uk/flights https://www.google.co.uk/flights