Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Google have decided that it’s more profitable to keep people on its own site than redirecting them elsewhere, a big change in its contract. Before, it was ‘structure your site well and we’ll send you traffic’. Now it’s becoming, ‘structure your site well and we’ll take your content, keeping the traffic for ourselves’.
The long term effects of this are that Google becomes one of the bloated portal sites that it disrupted in the late 90s - and sucks the life out of everything else.
I like that I can google for the weather or Dr. Fauci's age and get an answer directly. The results page always has links if I care to dig deeper but 99% of the time I'd rather get the answer and move on.
Directly from the article and the type of sketchy shit google has been doing recently where it basically scrapes/steals content from websites and displays directly in the search engine.
As usual, whenever you actually dig into these complaints it always turns out that the complainer is a galactic-scale leach doing something way sleazier than what they accuse search engines of doing.
Yes a store front charged a premium to host something on their platform. Like you can levy that complaint against practically every e-comerce website on the internet from e-bay, etsy, amazon, steam, overstock, etc.
And they do link to the creators websites. You can click through to their vendor page which can have a link to their personal website. https://filtergrade.com/vendor/carlos-viloria/
"how long does it take to get coronavirus test results"
Searching that, Google shows me a giant box with a red warning banner that says "COVID-19 alert". The box looks very authoritative, and in the box Google repeats back my question, and then provides an answer: 24 hours.
In the fine print, there's a link to a WebMD article (but when I click through, no where on WebMD does it say 24 hours).
The problem is that the actual turnaround time in my area (upstate new york) is 7-10 days to get results - according to a doctor who my Aunt got a test from yesterday.
This is far from an isolated case of showing bad information to an important question with too much authority.
> It may take a lab about 24 hours to run your test. But you might not get your results for several days.
That seems pretty reasonable, and it in no way seems authoritative to me (it sounds like an estimate).
Several days is still far off from 7-10 days.
The point is, I'd much rather see a link to my county's official Covid-19 testing information site, rather than an arbitrary outdated snippet pulled from a WebMD article. Google's "best guess" answer is often pretty bad.
It doesn't show it until you click on "How Long Do Test Results Take?" or View All
Yes, Wikipedia’s content is available for Google to take and display on its own site. But by not pushing through the traffic Google risks starving it off long term.
I used to work for a very large forum and information site, and as more of our content got picked up by Google’s snippet boxes, the more no-click searches and the corresponding decline in traffic we saw.
Google’s push to increase revenue is slowly but surely killing the golden goose.
After all, use a 5 second clip of a song for fair use and YouTube may automatically remove your video(or just the audio) on behalf of Universal Music Group.
Maybe websites ought to send DMCA takedown notices to Google when they find their content being used as answers in the search result page?
Google helps you by actually giving you information you search without having to go through a SEOd webpage feeding tracking advertisers. You want to make copyright even more abusive and restrictive for what? Feeding scummy websites that exist to collect clicks for returning simple facts? We're not talking Wikipedia type content here.
The relevant part of the doctrine is: >The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his original work. The court not only investigates whether the defendant's specific use of the work has significantly harmed the copyright owner's market, but also whether such uses in general, if widespread, would harm the potential market of the original. The burden of proof here rests on the copyright owner, who must demonstrate the impact of the infringement on commercial use of the work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
Whether a website is scummy or not does not come into play. And frankly the stuff I'm seeing showing up in snippets in google search are very much wikipedia-type content (often exactly wikipedia-type content). And we're not talking snippets that provide context on the search result to enable determining whether this is the content that one is looking for, we're talking significant pieces of the content, often reformatted and presented in such a way that not clicking on the site is precisely the objective of the presentation.
When was the last time you've seen an individual or small company win a fair use case against YouTubes abusive algorithm? Because the created content gets taken down constantly even if its fair use. The algorithm doesn't care... and neither do giant copyright holding corporations that issue automated frivolous takedowns.
If I was the 800 pound search engine throwing my weight around to quote a sentence from a movie or book, then yes, maybe I should be fined--or at least required to offer compensation.
I think there's a difference between a company with billions in revenue doing it versus "you".
> Google helps you by actually giving you information you search without having to go through a SEOd webpage feeding tracking advertisers.
You say this as if Google.com itself isn't the ultimate tracked web property for an advertising giant.
Except that the (current American) law doesn't work that way - the 800 pound gorillas use their billions to pay lawyers to abuse small creators and outlets based on such creative interpretations of copyright laws. The gorillas are capable of fighting a copyright battle at court over details while they can just abuse the same right into some individuals bankrupcy.
Giving them even more power over your expression is incredibly harmful to society.
You can't see how me quoting a line from a movie and Google reproducing tracts of content verbatim might be of different type?
Let's not make copyright even more cancerous as it already is.
I'm about as far from a copyright shill as you can get without being an information anarchist. I think the copyright system in the United States needs to be completely overhauled and should stop giving corporations indefinite monopolies over ideas. But this is a case where the existence of copyright could be a good thing for the little guy to resist abuse from Big Data.
So, by your own numbers, websites that create the content have just lost 99% of your page views to Google.
>What kinds of searches are you thinking about?
Sounds like pretty much all your searches can be used as examples then.
No because less than 100% of my searches are for questions with simple answers.
Part of the reason getting an answer quickly from Google is so appealing is because the sources that Google uses seem to be hostile to their audience. I use Google Fi and pay $10 / GB for my data which means your ad heavy page may cost me more in bandwidth fees than you get from ads.
Do you think newsreaders are as evil as Google? I use NetNewsWire on my tablet and very few of the feeds I subscribe to show any ads and I rarely click through to the source.
I haven't used an RSS reader in a while, so I may be wrong on this but:
1) Last I remembered content creators could still place ads that are displayed through the reader, so it's not a complete loss if you don't click through.
2) NetNewsWire is not operating at nearly the same scale as Google, and isn't coming close to the anti-competitive, monopolistic effects that Google has.
There are clearly some benefits to users in the short term, but in the long term it just entrenches Google further and hurts competition, which is bad for users in the long term.
Think about Amazon's Echo, Apple's Siri, or the Google Assistant. You can ask any of them about weather or Dr. Fauci's age and get basic factual answers. I would expect digital assistants to be able to handle queries of much greater complexity in the future and I would expect google.com to keep up with that. If they make the user experience great, users will keep using Google and if that's where the users are, then that's where publishers will want to be as well.
The barrier to switching search engines is ridiculously low. If Google starts to make decisions that are bad for users (and I would consider forcing users to click through to a weather site a bad idea) then they will switch to a better search engine.
Echo/Siri/Google assistant actually make it harder for people to switch, because the average user is not going to install google assistant on an echo device, which means they have to spend money and learn a new device in order to use a new assistant. So if in your future you're treating assistants as search engines, lock-in becomes worse.
>If Google starts to make decisions that are bad for users
Google has already made plenty of decisions that are bad for users, and they still have 90% market share because there's no meaningful competition.
You're basically envisioning a dystopian future where facts are controlled by a small set of mega corporations.
The other side of that coin is that you also have to pay the cost of losing of the freedom to be discovered online if you have something to say. If you have a brilliant way of telling people the weather with 100% accuracy then you're not going to get anywhere with that because no one leaves Google to get the weather forecast any more.
I think this already happens, as an example I was searching for something like "X in Garry Mod" and most things on the results were youtube results. I can't prove this is deliberate but it feels weird you search for some API and you get either a full page of Youtube results or Google answers.
Google always controlled the search results, and therefore the information you were going to see. Filtering the pages they link to isn't materially different from filtering the facts they choose to feature.
There's also a complete lack of motive here: Google allows you to pay them to "manipulate" SERPS (by placing your ad on it). And they tend to follow local laws. Beyond that, there just aren't any credible examples of manipulation, nor are there any plausible theories as to what would motivate them to do so.
I believe people feel uneasy about these changes because it's unsustainable: when they cut off all traffic to <x>, <x> will soon stop producing the data Google is recycling.
Plus, we all see ourselves as potential heroes in a story about some scrappy startup or project doing cool things with barely any budget and being successful. That opportunity relies on search as one of very few zero-cost meritocratic channels to find users.
The difference is that now they're incentivizing you not to click on the search results for informational searches. There could be damning evidence that IAmEveryone is mean to kittens on the first result, but if people don't click it they'll never know.
And they have been caught over and over either flat out memory holing or burying things they are ideologically opposed to as well.
Occasionally I'll get lucky with a hyper-specific query that hasn't been SEO to shit, but otherwise Google search has become a glorified Yellow Pages.
Far from being AI, I've watched Google search get dumber with time.
The problem is different and is similar to oil exploitation. Google is exploiting the website content for enormous benefit and with no compensation. If Google compensated the websites it takes content from (50%-50% profit split?) it would be a whole another tune.
There is still hope if switching lay people over to more consumer friendly products. Just like any transition it’ll take time and effort.
Hopefully more people continue to switch.
waiting for the boomers on this site to realize how much youtube has turned into google search seo spam
Maybe that's not so tangential after all. Assured of their own power, formerly over other search engines, now increasingly over the websites themselves, they have no incentive to put out a really great product.
It eliminates all the recommendations, and the majority of the guesses about context, relevance, etc. Combine that with judicious use of quotes and it's still possible to have decent error message/keyword searches.
Never thought I would pine for Altavista.
FYI: see also [1] and [2] as additional upcoming measures by Google
[1]: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/03/announcing-mobile-...
The story changes if the web continues to grow and more folks do more business over the web.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
(Of course one would have to find an exhaustive list of all the web-spiders they have and their UA strings, but you get my point...)
Yes, Google has and is very much abusing their position when it comes to (re-)directing traffic to other websites, but one has to wonder how much from that is a disaster of the affected sites' own making when they've tried for so long to squeeze every last drop of "SEO juice" out of their content and use every dirty advertiser trick under the sun.
Advertisers will go where the people go, but Google's balance sheets suggest there is enormous scope for a middleman to go and negotiate with the Apples/Mozillas/Microsofts of the world to give them a better cut of the search revenue.
I can imagine a key based system where I register a token with, say, "Hoogle" and then also register it with the browser doing the searching. Then get paid a tiny amount if enough searches get made with it.
If it works at all that'd be a brutal model for Google to compete with. Suddenly all the casual IT types would be directing all their friends and family to Hoogle because they make money off it. Corporations would ban Google en-mass. It'd squeeze all the revenue out of the search middleman and back to whoever controlled the computers.
To the large portion of the population who doesn't understand that the "top result" on a Google search is an ad, this is already where we are at. The subtle but impactful changes to make ads incrementally less distinguishable from real results has brought us here.
There isn't anything magical about Google or Google's ability to provide a search service. It isn't easy, but it isn't outside the skills of the top 2-5% of developers. If a company figures out a superior business model they can be disrupted.
It’s a no-win state.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
You don't trust their content but you trust their content?
(And before people start pointing fingers at ad providers, reminder Google is one of the largest?)
There's what you don't like, and there's what you don't trust (in the computing security sense of the word).
If you don't trust them to not do stuff that actually harms your computer, you shouldn't trust their content.
The sites that serve most of the malware on the internet don't have stuff Google is going to quote in a search result...
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Now there's the stuff you don't like, their big ads, and their slow page and what not, but that's their content. They need to pay for it somehow.
People will pay $5 for coffee from some random coffee shop they've never visited, but they won't pay 99 cents for an app someone put a few years of development into with 5 star reviews.
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If you like their info, but not how they want to deliver it, why not abandon it until they change their tune? Why act like Google is doing some great service robbing them of their traffic just because you don't like how they serve info?
Especially when enough people apparently are ok with it that Google felt they were the best place on the internet to steal this info from?
This is a trope, but is it true? Maybe these spendy people buying all these $5 coffees are also buying apps and renting movies and looking at ads, while the cheapskates making drip at home are pirating and ad-blocking.
Apple isn't making tens of $billions off people refusing to buy apps.
But couldn't you do a quick search to find out for yourself?
https://www.businessinsider.com/just-2-of-app-installs-lead-...
I mean you're saying "tens of billions" like it's a large chunk but the same estimates showing 61 billion from all billing (not just app sales) are showing half a trillion dollars from the App Store alone in total
So yes, app sales are a pittance when it comes to the revenue the App Store generates, let alone what Apple generates.
That said, I have full faith in people. Specifically for people to drop Google and move to smaller search engines if Google no longer shows them the best content.
And to use adblockers. Google gives me fairly good results most of the time with uBlock Origin and I'm always surprised by how bad the results are without it (when I see only ads).
I blame OKRs and quarterly planning. Those that care about the 10-year health of a business are shouted down by those who get bonuses by sacrificing long term gain for short term gain.
Can definitely recommend The Innovator's Dilemma [0] for those who haven't read it yet.
it's not that easy when Google has made an effort to push their browser aggressively, especially when they notice you on Google without a Chrome user agent. This has led them to have ~80% marketshare. Switching from the default search portal still doesn't free the user from being data-mined as users are generally logged into the browser. Separately, web visits hit Google DNS or SafeSearch APIs enabling them to continue build user-profiles.
All their free services are meant to drive stickyness. From Gmail to Youtube to Maps to Google Assistant, people like free things -- even if all their data is being mined -- and Google's single account ensures users are locked in and unable to escape from the bigG ecosystem.
Unless you go out of your way, I believe logging into a Google account on Chrome automatically logs you into the Browser too.
Google basically always finds what I'm looking for (or what I think I'm looking for). Bing gets it maybe 60% of the time, and DDG is even less.
I'm the creator of Runnaroo.
Nope, not related to Brave, but there maybe conversations soon to add Runnaroo as one of the default search options in Brave.
We are exploring different ways to monetize, and wanted to make possible options upfront in the privacy policy. I am always open to feedback or suggestions. Whatever direction we end up going, the core focus is always preserving user privacy.
Is there any specific reason affiliate links are worrying? It is currently one of the main ways DuckDuckGo monetizes
You use DDG for privacy, not ad free.
How about each web site indexing their own contents and then there being a mechanism for your client to crawl the indexes, just like a DNS resolver will query servers until it finds the answer it wants. My iPhone is leaps and bounds more powerful than desktops of a decade ago - there is zero reason to pool power in data centers. Indeed it would be impractical for Google to replicate the power of all the clients worldwide in a data center.
I hate SEO and love the organic content which is now far limited to just hobby bloggers.
Truth be told, Google's #1 objective is to be human. That is, to recommend what a human would recommend, but automated and at scale. This is why Google consistently recommends: Design for the human, not the bot + algorithm.
Taken a step further with personalization, Google just want to be you. That is, what would you recommend to you if you could. Who is going to make you more happy than you?
Sure SEO is a cat & mouse game but the arc of that plot is the cat wins more and more often. Eventually the mouse will be wise to assimilate.
My thoughts and prayers are with the SEO industry.