> In a world where Google is now hurting content creators and site owners more than it is helping them
I have a hard time believing that because so few sites opt out of Google indexing.
I have a hard time believing that because so few sites opt out of Google indexing.
Google has been providing results right in search, meaning that I no longer need to click a link. I would say 80% of my searches are answered by the knowledge graph and smart answers.
In the past, Google created value for website owners by both directing traffic towards them, and sharing ad revenue with them. Now it's doing neither.
They generally do compensate web sites. For example, when I ask for today's weather, it comes from weather.com and if I ask for the exchange rate for Canadian dollars, it comes from Morningstar. Both of those companies have a deal with Google to provide that information.
The FTC found that Google illegally took content from competitors, but Google was able to lobby away any punitive action: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-il...
If they do compensate any web sites it's only because the sites are too big to steal from or because they were sued and lost.
While a business can control the information on it's website, it can't control the information on Google's, and often that is not to consumers' benefit.
I don't think it holds up for commercial sites, but for news, hobbies, and blogs (which have been hit hardest by Google's vampire advertisement business) your statement is true for me!
1. User opens the browser, which defaults to the correct website the user is looking for.
2. User goes to Google instead, and searches for the company name. Clicks on the link for the company.
3. User navigates through the company website for the exact same page that the browser was set to open to by default.
> Nobody's answer is going to be to refuse the crumbs.
Except those that think about opportunity cost.
Google's instant answers is a case of them putting the user first and that's hardly ever the wrong decision.
Instant answers is a direct threat to organized knowledge on the Internet, and that can't, by definition, be putting the user first. When we look at my link in my original comment, we discover that instant answers gets Google a larger percentage of the ad money (all of it), and suddenly, we figure out who Google is putting first: Google.
I think your worry about this overblown. If Google doesn't do a good job with these, then that's an opportunity for somebody to do a better job.
If you are stuck on an ad-supported model from the days of the dot-com boom, then I'm not sure you have a place in the current ecosystem where a lot of searches are started with a voice query and the user expects a short, definitive answer. The ever increasing number of searches that result in no clicks is surely influenced by the rise of Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, Siri, etc...
Most people won't, perhaps, but I run a handful of reasonably popular websites, and I block Google's crawlers. I have no use for Google.