Google Search is only 18% Search
blog.jitbit.com
blog.jitbit.com
1) the left-hand column is counted as non-search, when the left-hand column is entirely about search. The left-hand column gives you ways to refine your search: you can limit the types of search results like news/images, slice/dice search results by date, limit search results to verbatim matches or to change the geographic weighting of search results, etc.
2) the actual search box is counted as non-search, as are the estimated results count and the time the search took.
3) the article treated whitespace as non-search, when shorter columns can actually make it easier and faster for users to scan the results.
That's still leaving aside facts like
- We actually think our ads can be as helpful as the search results in some cases. And no, that's not a new attitude. I found a quote from 2004 that said "In entering the advertising market, Google tested our belief that highly relevant advertising can be as useful as search results or other forms of content," and I'm sure I could find similar quotes with a bit more looking.
- And of course there are tons of searches where we don't show ads. A lot of people like to take a query that shows ads and say "Aha!" but they're forgetting all the queries that don't show ads.
Not to mention that our ads aren't just a straight auction; we try to take into account things like the quality of the destination page in deciding whether and where to show ads, just like we do with web search results.
Adjusting my browser window size accordingly, I search for "flowchart software". Only 2 organic results are above the fold, whereas there are 7 ads above the fold. 2/9 = 22%, so the OP really wasn't that far off the mark for many users.
The ads are just another form of search.
If the software company is large enough to afford a marketing team to fill Google up with ads then there's a good chance the software will also have big dollars spent on it.
Contrariwise, if the software you're looking for is already large and complex (driven by the nature of what it needs to do), then ads will mean nothing because they will be expected.
While on the other end of the scale with small purpose-built apps you will deliberately ignore ads since you won't want any bulky bloatware that can afford adspace.
- higher prices
- worse customer service
- fewer features
- the company eventually going under as they get priced out of the ecosystem
You won't find many subjective comparisons & reviews of players in the ads (it will all be companies selling themselves) and you probably won't typically find any free or open source software either.
In reference to #2, I've never found the result count or time the search took to be of much use.
I'm also not convinced that ads are actually ever useful. I'd love to see an example of one that you think is useful for the search.
You do make a good point on white space. Does that only apply to whitespace near the results, or is that for the entire page?
Ads can totally be useful; here's one from earlier today: [att cordless phones]. For Google's web results, we often interpret a query [X] as "information about X." The #1 web search result I see is http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/ which does have information about cordless phones from AT&T. But I was looking for which models of cordless phones AT&T has. There's an ad that points to http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-telephones/... which is actually more helpful because that shows me a bunch of different models.
Now you can argue that Google should be able to find and somehow return the page that AT&T bought the ad for. But that can be a hard problem (Bing returns the same page that Google does at #1 for example, as does DDG). So that ad was quite helpful for me, because it took me to a great page.
What is not reasonable is how deceptively similar the ad looks to an actual search result. If Google is confident about an Ad being information then why not let people click it for its relevance? Why make the background just barely different from the search result so that its almost impossible to visually separate ads from results? Let people clearly know that its an ad and let them decide whether they want to click on it or not.
Bing is as deceptive as Google here so not singling you guys out but please don't portray a reasonable effort to make money as a something larger than that.
I'm not sure if this is true as I almost never click on an actual add link rather then a search link. I'm not sure if this is subconscious (I'm simply not seeing the adds), but I think if it was deceptive I'd be clicking them all the time.
Most searchers are unable to distinguish the difference between search ads and content. From a number of surveys we did here http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results
"Even directly after viewing a search result with 3 ads in it, most users are uncertain of where ads may appear, what color the ads are, and if the search result even had any ads in it!"
No doubt, especially since you work for Google. When ads are similar looking to content why even bother to do a much better job to find content when ads can fill that void? Better content equals less clicks on ads.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. "
The problem for Google is that soon enough people will notice what Panda and Penguin did.
I can't believe you're being honest here. Counting just the last couple days, terms I've seen useful ads are: "trek stores near <where I live>", "glue for wood", "coach usa" and "shuttle lga". Also for the vast majority of terms in my search history, which happen to be arcane technical questions, I don't see any ads at all.
Look at the results of that query right there. I'd say the ads are at least as good as the results.
To be fair, he should have also calculated the space the ads take up. However, one can tell by eye (from those screenshots at least) that that space has increased.
The conclusion he draws (neglecting ease of use) doesn't logically follow from the data, though.
But what about Google testing 7 and 4 results per SERP page?
I mean no offence but if you guys are showing less organic results there is nothing Google could say to convince me that they not promoting ads more than organic results?
I agree ADS are just as relevant if not more than organic results and in most cases better than organic results as people spending money on the ads, normally spend a lot of money and time in their products and or services as well as landing page to ensure the UX is great and that it will lead to a sale.
But not everyone has money?
As someone who works managing PPC adverts I have been referred to as "Google meat based matching algorithm"
A. Ads can be helpful, even on MFA site (and clicked very good if organic results not providing any answers). This technique was tested by lot of webmasters before. Also it just matter of thinking (ads is really helpful) and earnings reports.
Peoples visit google to search the web, but not to search adwords websites. But google give maximum priority for ads, not for their main product - organic search results. It will lead to decreased importance of google as search engine very soon. That articles you mention here - search google or bing and you will find lot of different opinions.
B: that searches where no adwords is not commercial. 99% of peoples creating websites & content because it their workjob, what mean webmasters also need to make money. If it not happens - it will mean less importance of google for webmasters and for searchers in nearest future. Just check how google alexa traffic rank fluctuating after black & white animals (time when google places ads above fold in search results).
C: So maximum daily budget/ppc is not important anymore? 8-P
http://startupboy.com/2005/12/20/fix-the-search-interface-fi...
The reason the prefer ads in the left column to the right is that is where most the attention goes & most of the clicks go. Ads at the top of the left column of the search results might get a 20% to 30% clickthrough rate (higher than that even on navigational search results...more like 90%+). And ads in the right column are lucky to get even a 1% CTR.
(I know you don't believe what you wrote but you had to say it anyway. Google's attitude changed in 2004 when you added ads on top, so attitude shifts to justify whatever you do. See Google's attitude on the original Pagerank paper)
Ads are as helpful as content? First there's a major conflict of interest since you control both ads and content. One update and content shifts, making ads by default better or worst. A tiny shifts not noticed by 99% of people can increase your profits by a wide margin. A tiny shift here and a Panda shift there and your revenue reaches $50 Billion a year, or a huge cut of the total e-comm trade.
If I search for Adidas 2012 VX Shoe (made it up) and I see 3-4 ads on top, why are they more helpful? Because they have it, because they have most reviews, cheapest price or what? In every case I have tried advertising it's the ad price difference, especially among top merchants. Of course that ad price is added to the consumer one way or another so nice try, portraying this as a helpful thing. Equally as important, the sites that lost traffic due to more ads are forced to go out of business or advertise /increase bids. A vicious cycle, induced by Google, to benefit Google.
>> And of course there are tons of searches where we don't show ads.
There is no money in many searches, that's known, nothing altruistic about it. You show ads where you have ads and where it is profitable, in key markets.
>> Not to mention that our ads aren't just a straight auction; we try to take into account things like the quality of the destination page in deciding whether and where to show ads, just like we do with web search results.
The difference between Geico, Progressive, All State et al is just the ad price and CTR, in sum how much money you make from them. The best site for the user would be a comparison site or maybe a CNN Fortune article that compared them.
The real questions: Should Google be trusted to rank organic search in an unbiased manner when they have a huge incentive to manipulate them, quarter by quarter? The only sure thing, unless Google is lying to SEC, is that Google's profits are increasing by an extraordinary amount after all these changes were made.
Is it good for the economy and for the web to have one company that controls both ranking and ads? Google control as much as 95% in some EU countries and roughly 70% in USA. You are talking about monopoly territory.
Absolutely. And it is worth noting that recent Progressive case, where they defended a person who killed a Progressive auto insurance client (to try to skip out on paying the settlement to their customer's family).
Having a diversity of the same types of companies (basically what often amounts to white label brands with the same exact business model) isn't the same thing as offering various entry points into various stages of the funnel & different editorial opinions.
Also the brand bias in the organic results often makes them parallel the ads once more. And that awareness is often driven by advertising. The day after the Progressive fiasco I remember going to YouTube and seeing a huge Progressive ad. ;)
Once again, people dismiss ads as simply spam or something that provides no value to the search query when in study after study, at least on Adwords and SEM, paid results often boost relevance vs. a page only of organic results. This will of course differ by query and category of query but Google has already done a lot of work to make sure ads don't show for queries that have little to no commercial value or do not have enough query volume to risk jeopardizing the search experience.
If you're shopping for something, the paid and Google shopping results are often more relevant than the organic results since a lot of them incorporate real time price feeds or promotion codes. These are driven by the recognition of your shopping intent
Advertisers do not bid on keywords that deliver no economic value so it's in their best interest to only show up when they are the most relevant to your query. Through quality score, AdWords also shows ads that have been engaged with most often and with strong landing pages so that you don't get spammy ads or irrelevant ads that are unrelated to your query.
I don't do that because if a website or web service doesn't respect me as a customer, pushing annoying ads down my throat, I would rather stop reading/using it, which is a form of voting with your wallet. Instead I prefer to reward loyalty to websites that are tasteful and put users interests first. As an example, such a website would be Reddit.
Installing ad-blockers has the reverse effect of what most users want. Ads will become more and more intrusive and difficult to block. And by visiting such a website, you're still giving that website eyeballs, you're still passing links around to your friends, you're still rewarding them for their behavior. It's like hiding the cookie jar from a fat kid, then congratulating him for being fat.
Installing ad-blockers is also immoral, just as software piracy is. I've seen arguments of people that don't think so, but it's hard to justify the piracy of Photoshop when there are free or cheaper alternatives available, it's hard to justify the piracy of MS Office when LibreOffice is available and it's hard to justify using Google Search with ad-blockers when there are alternatives like DDG.
If you don't like the ads served, just don't freaking use the service/website in question. It's amazing how self-entitled some people are.
I have zero responsibility in the website business model. I don't want to see ads either on TV or on the web, I use the available tools. I've used ad blockers proxies since 1998 or so.
When some websites (reddit, osnews) ask nicely to deactivate adblock to support them, I do. When they whine about how that's their business model (like ars technica), I don't.
Oh BTW software piracy isn't immoral. It's maybe wrong, but morality has nothing to do with it. After all Photoshop and MS Office success rely at least for a part on software piracy. Furthermore, from your point of view Gutenberg was wrong because of all those poor scribes he put out of jobs by going against their century-proven business model. Does not make much sense, doesn't it?
This is not about responsibility towards a business model, it's more about rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. As a consumer, you definitely don't want bad treatment.
After all Photoshop and MS Office success rely at
least for a part on software piracy
Companies like Adobe and Microsoft have pockets deep enough to ensure that piracy is kept under control. But the story is very different for small companies or independent developers that just want to make a living. Also piracy doesn't work in the same way for games, or other products that people aren't using on a daily basis.
That's why I consider piracy immoral - it kills small software developers, it perpetuates the monopoly of big companies and is simply unfair to the people that worked on that software, pushing them towards more control, flawed technologies (DRM) and server-side subscriptions (in which case users don't really own anything anymore, not even their own data).
However, it seems to me that software piracy is a given of the media; there is no solution to it. Remember the 1976 Bill Gates' open letter to pirates? It's like drug prohibition: there is one supposed "right" state of the affairs which is unattainable, but for some reason the pragmatic approach is taboo.
I suppose software piracy is actually closer to the "tragedy of the commons" mechanisms than actual theft.
For the record, I also pirate movies and music from time to time, because I live in Romania and getting certain music and movies is difficult - most content available in the US is either not available in my country, or is made available with a significant delay. I don't have access to services like Netflix, the content on iTunes is a fraction of what's available in the US, the local bands still sell packaged CDs and we don't have a local Amazon/iTunes, etc...
Fortunately for HBO Romania, they are airing shows as soon as they are available. I also go out to movie theaters, but I only go to movies that are worth it. I'm not going to go out for a subpar movie, but I would pay $2 for viewing it in my home, if only such a thing was possible as soon as they are released.
Basically these media companies are shooting themselves in the foot by restricting the availability of content. Too bad that we don't have a "piracy subscription" to be paid monthly, because I would gladly pay it.
"Most everyone knows that half.." - I think that statements needs to be qualified because as far as I have observed, only tech people approach targeted Google ads with this much skepticism that 50% of ads are scams and 50% are dubious.
(Your statements imply majority or near-consensus opinions; I see no evidence to support these assertions.)
In many cases such feed prices are inaccurate. I have used Google shopping many times looking for the advertised price only to find it's "out of stock" or the promotion had ended by the time you click the link. People do the same crap to the other shopping search engines too.
>Advertisers do not bid on keywords that deliver no economic value so it's in their best interest to only show up when they are the most relevant to your query.<
In some case the economic value isn't in the best interest of users. A lot of spam targets installing malware, invading privacy, or similar. Further, there are ads which advise you to "buy x thousand links for cheap" or similar, which at their core suggest you violate Google's search guidelines. And Google had like 50,000 advertisers pushing counterfeit goods at one point (according to Google) and that issue got cleaned up only after Google was hit with a sting operation where they were caught selling ads for steroids for a person posing as a Mexican drug lord. Apparently the drug lord had a high quality score at the time. ;)
Can you point to some of those studies ?
Specifically some person said "If someone searches for 'x,y, z' put my Ad up there" which is still much more accurate than an algorithm trying to guess. We do a game on our search page where if you put /monte at the end of your query we'll throw up the Google results, the Bing results, and the Blekko results. Then you get to pick the one that you, the searcher, thought was the best answer. We've found that well curated categories do really well in this comparison. Ads are simply a market motivated curation of Google's results.
The ads platform is self-optimizing, punishing advertisers with poor ads, low relevance, and poor brand perception. This results in ads that are from more trustworthy sellers and whom generate real customer interaction to justify buying those ads. To me, this system encourages higher relevance in commerce queries because those who deliver the best user experiences after you leave Google are the ones that can afford to bid to the top of the ads marketplace.
It's a failure to deliver value to the searcher and a failure to deliver value to the advertiser.
The idea is fine, but if in practice people just ignore the ads...
Google is making great money from search-based ads, of course, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a massive inefficiency created by a large number of users ignoring a large number of ads.
The obvious opportunity for a competitor is to correct that inefficiency and deliver more value for searchers and advertisers.
I don't know if I would call it a failure for the advertiser since compared to other forms of advertising, you only pay when users engage with your ad. Impressions are free for the advertisers if users see but don't click. For Google, I do agree that it's a qualified failure in that some people want to block these results or ignore them but I think they've been taking steps to fix this by making ads less static and more dynamic like with their shopping results or with their hotel/airfare products.
I'm very rarely looking for a search result that takes me to a place to spend money.
Even with commercial queries, I'm usually looking for a review of some sort first, and only then am I looking for the opportunity to buy.
I usually have both the query and query + [reviews] open in separate tabs. Either that, or just the reviews query, because that usually surfaces enough ads that I can click through all the major players myself.
I'm rarely looking for a search result that takes me to a place to spend money either, but when I'm not I usually don't get ads either. Check out [jquery touch] or [haskell ffi] or even [gabby douglas] and [us open]. No ads on any of them.
I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion, or what constitutes a large number. I'm not saying your wrong exactly, but it sounds like some pretty significant assumptions are being made in your statement. Proof?
I was actually under the impression that most people find the ads relevant more often that not. However, I can't remember where I read that so I won't stand behind it.
Someone will do it better than Google is doing it now. It might be Google that improves it, it might not.
For the search "saas help desk" (https://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=saas+help+desk)
I see: http://imgur.com/xMB6t
They see: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Vq-qWuUPZE/UER9ChRkKQI/AAAAAAAAAd...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
It wouldn't be too hard to make an ad-blocker that used CSS and Javascript to do all of the blocking during page render. It'd be an inefficient use of bandwidth and rendering time, but it'd be able to block 100% of ads and undetectable from the web server.
In fact, before Opera had a built-in ad-blocker, I think there was an ad-block extension built on its "User Javascript" and custom CSS abilities.
function verifyAds() {
if (!adContentsVisible()) {
loadAdContents();
}
setTimeout(verifyAds, 1000);
}
verifyAds();window.adContentsVisible = function () { return true; }
(function() {
// local scope, can't override
})();
Render the page, identify the regions of the resulting bitmap which are ads, and blank them out. The browser can always just lie at the end, even after running all of the JavaScript and marking all of the DOM elements to visible.
function adContentsVisible() { return true }Google can have a team of 10 working full time racing Ad-Blocker's volunteers.
Google can ask for ever more aggressive permissions from web masters, Ad-Blockers must play nice with browsers' plugin api.
Google can hire away the most productive Ad-Blocker developers.
Google can ban ad-blockers from chrome's plugin repository and halve the ad-blocker userbase overnight.
Google has the warchest for a multi year engagement. Most plugin authors cannot last a single year fighting full time.
If Google went total war then ad-blockers would disappear within a year. It would be a massive PR hit, maybe even a legal issue. The risks make it all a numbers game, but there does exist a point where Google can no longer ignore ad-blockers. Thus ad-block users must be careful and not become too numerous.
And at the end of the day, the web page is rendered on hardware (a display) owned by the user. In the very worst case, the final bitmap being displayed could be modified to remove ads; this crude approach could not be stopped short of a totalitarian state (Google isn't quite that strong) or mangling web pages into unreadability (in which case they wouldn't get traffic so ads would be pointless).
But it would never get that far, for the simple reason of accessibility (i.e. for people with disabilities). Accessible websites are machine comprehensible, to a greater or lesser degree. What the machine can comprehend (in form, if not meaning), it can edit.
During those 30 minutes of vulnerability Google is losing only the marginal cost of serving an ad-free search, a rounding error.
During the other 30 minutes ad-blockers will lose users. Users of ad-blockers are not fanatics, they have no moral issues with ads. They are normal people who are using ad-blockers because it improves their browsing experience. So what happens when these ad-blockers temporarily ruin the browsing experience? They'll temporarily turn off said ad-blocker. By the 87th time what percentage will have given up on ad-blockers for good? If that percentage is anything greater than 0% then Google is winning.
The race is not like the DRM arms race, it is more akin to the virus arms race. Users want to run untrusted code and said untrusted code wants to do something the users do not want it to do.
I would say that the arms race is highly asymmetrical against Google. Building ad-blocking technology isn't that hard, so the labor force force is significantly larger than Google could ever afford to combat.
Google is smart to not take on this battle. Only a small percentage of user's install ad-blocking software, and those users would not likely click on ads anyway. Now, if only Google could teach the RIAA of its ways.
Google search results are different every time, and the freshness of a result is essential to its utility. If you always needed "today's version of The Movie" then piracy would be much easier to thwart.
Those who are minded to go out of their way to install something that blocks ads probably aren't very likely to click ads anyway.
They are also probably technology 'leaders' who help sites to bring in all the regular folk who do click the ads.
Google is probably the least likely company to lose users this way, but they have another factor that they want a good reputation with that community because they want to hire lots of them.
AdBlock allows Google customers to self-segment the same way. Win-win.
I'd be a more accurate/fairer way to represent the info by providing 3 categories: organic, ads, navigation/misc. If you did this, you'd provably see a closer to 40/60 split, still in favor of ads. Similar to what you showed in your screenshot from the past.
So the way he discusses the real estate devoted to fulfilling his purpose is quite reasonable.
Also, if Google decided to some how change to using 2 columns of organic search so they could squeeze 16 results into a single page, you'd hear just as much, if not more, complaining.
Ideally, in the perfect world, I don't need the navigation, page 2, or even a place to refine my search. Ideally, I don't need any of that.
If we're talking about what I want, that's it.
And behold, that perfect world exists now: "I'm Feeling Lucky".
Also, "I'm Feeling Lucky" isn't an option for me, not in the version of Chrome I have anyway. Even if I explicitly load the www.google.com which shows the feeling lucky button, as soon as I type 1 letter in the box the screen changes to an interactive search, which no longer has the lucky button.
Or, you could set "I'm Feeling Lucky" to be Chrome's default search: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/pDpfTIoSa... . Basically, you add "btnl=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky" to the Google search URL.
Well, except perhaps my query at the top so I can refine it if necessary.
It seems like poor UX to me. It's a little ugly how line length isn't constrained and you're unable to do anything but type a query into the box. Special queries would require memorizing commands or just doing without.
I don't use that many special queries, except sometimes "site:", and frankly if I have to type (or paste) the entire domain anyway, "site:" is way less effort than switching to a different text field, even if it were one of the defaults.
I'd be OK having a "More Options" link or something for the rare case when I want to search for images by color or whatever.
Having said that, I'm aware this is very much a personal opinion. Google can design their site for the majority. I don't mind.
And if that is the case, I must concur. I fail to understand why Google added a large side bar instead of adding more top bars in the unused space next to the logo (perhaps right under the search text box). The designers at Google may disagree but the Jitbit guy sure has a point.
The main reason I disagree with the conclusion is that the area used by Google, or any other company for that matter, for navigation/other tools is hardly equivalent to space used for ads.
That in no way is intended to say that the space is used "efficiently".
Queries about programming topics - "sinatra post parameters" is one I tried a few minutes ago - usually don't have ads.
Of course this doesn't even scratch the surface of running a site for ad revenue that provides free information to common search questions, e.g., "how do I change the oil in my car"
I suspect that all ad-revenue sites are subject to the same economic pressures. Almost all such companies eventually succumb to these pressures.
All such companies will tend to cater to the lowest common denominator. They will tend to put their own interests (that of showing ads and increasing ad effectiveness) over the interests of users.
Perhaps there is an opportunity for a paid integrated search/email/calendar/reminders/maps/events application? You pay them $5 or $10 per month, and they do their best to create the best possible experience for you. Apple and Microsoft are well positioned to become this company as well, as is Google.
Wouldn't it be ironic if Yahoo! became this company?
(Though, personally, in this case, I don't think Google's getting enough credit. The added space for search tools is designed to make search better for most users, and probably do, even if most of us don't need them.)
You've just described Google Apps for Business (well, except for search).
The rest was AdWords.
To make things worse, Google adds more and more "product search" results (paid placement).
With each day, there's less and less traffic for those people who don't pay Google. I suspect that the paid placement trend will increase until it is possible.
To make things worse, Google not only decreases the SERP "real estate". They also introduce frequent algorithm updates which tend to drop down websites which earn on search-engine traffic. Leaving those which may have lesser quality but don't earn on their traffic ( no monetization ). And if you do it to a million websites, you will gain quite a lot of new AdWords buyers. Some of them have to try your PPC ads. Let's say that 10% of them will try to get traffic out of PPC - now you've got yourself 100.000 paying customers.
It's obvious they want to force people both to buy and to click ads. They don't gain anything by sending free traffic to other affiliate websites ( which will then convert to sales/leads ).
The question is: Where do you draw a line between a search engine and an "ad engine"?
To many people, especially those less tech-savy, Google = Internet.
I personally think, it's pretty bad for the overall state of e-economy to have this one big mogul who administers the majority of targetted traffic. He wants his share of the pie from everyone. If you are too small to pay, fuck you. They don't need you. The consumer won't notice you are not in the search results, there are 50 other websites happy to take your place. Either you are at the top or you don't exist.
It'd be great if there would be something like Google but with a more "socialistic" approach. Instead of having a few websites occupying the top place, provide the traffic to other, smaller players. So the e-economy can expand more.
How would you do that? Throw in some random numbers to shuffle the search results?
35% ads only 1% of the time isn't nearly so bad as 35% ads all the time. And the auctions help guarantee that ad-crowding happens most often when searchers are actually well served by advertisements.
People searching for "saas help desk" probably want to find people to sell them support, rather than just info about saas. Searching for just "saas" alone reduces ad volume. Searching for "origin of saas" reduces ad levels further. Wikipedia is the top entry, and we're down to one lonely ad at the bottom of the page.
Similar divergences occur with "linux" and "linux support."
I'm not convinced fewer ads would be better. Imagine asking a friend for help with your broken machine, and he hands you the short biography of Linus Torvalds.
When you want pure information (for me, most of the time) ads drift out of the picture. When you want to buy something, they're more prominent, just as you probably want them to be.
N.B. - There is a hell of a lot of whitespace on a 1920x1080 monitor though.
I like the infinite scroll on duckduckgo; I have AutoPager plugin on chrome to get something similar with google.
How is DDG any better really?
The results are hit or miss...I probably !g about half my queries. But the other half are entirely pleasant experiences and I'm hopeful DDG continues to get better.
In the recent screen capture all the whitespace is added to the non-search results.
In the not-so-recent results there is a fair amount of whitespace added to the search results (as well as non-search).
It's also interesting to note that the old results page is displaying multiple results for single domains using result nesting, while the new results page displays only one listing for each domain. The end result is that the same number of 'effective search results' are displayed on the page for both versions.
The gradual transformation of white space into content is a natural evolution in the life of any web product. While the feature set is simple, the design can be sparse. Mature products benefit from rich feature sets, with the drawback of having to sacrifice the sparse visual design that may have initially distinguished them from the competition.
But I agree, I shouldve been more precise
EDIT:
Turns this: http://f.cl.ly/items/2y1F0d2d0a2K3L1n0Q2m/1.png
It seems like most of this complaint should be directed at the navigation sidebar to the left. I'd imagine Google tested the sidebar ad nauseam, though, and is leaving it there for a reason (probably increased engagement in other search products and more readily exposes advanced refinements).
I say 'or not', because there are well established readability reasons for having a narrow content width. Would many people genuinely prefer the google of the 2008 screenshot? The days of sites with full page width text are largely gone, and for good reason.
I'm sure google would also suggest that the ads are content.
* Author has a small screen.
* Author compares results space vs everything else, and then calls it "ads"
On my 1920x1200 screen, overall ad space and results space actually take up the same amount of space. There's a ton of UI and white-space though. While Google could arguably make better use of their empty space, suggesting the remainder is entirely ads is absurd.
Screenshot with results in red and ads in blue: http://i.imgur.com/YTspx.png
Author has a big screen. His screenshot shows five results above the fold. I can barely see two on my 1280x800.
The argument works both ways.
Even if you're on something like an iPad you still have 1024 vertical and end up with plenty of content. Only netbooks and/or low-quality screens have this issue.
(1) the bias toward current results seems overweighted. Maybe I'm the only one this annoys. I use the custom date settings more than any other feature on Google, maybe it could always be exposed.
(2) I wish there wasn't two buttons that say "News" that do different things while they have more sets of buttons in identically analogous places that say "Images" and "Maps" yet for some reason both buttons do exactly the same thing.
Times have definitely changed.
Note: I work at Google but not on web search, ads, or UI design. This is just based on my personal observations.
http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-Burnin...
Check it out for yourself. You see that big, prominant "Download Now" button - that's an ad served by googleadservices.com.
I don't know how they get away with crap like this, it surely must be against their own ad policy.
http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
I'll ping folks internally. If you look at the button with Developer Tools, it's one single giant image that's an ad for Download Manager. The advertiser stuck a Download button on it and is presumably running ads on sites where you download things.
I quite often type in a search term for something that I imagine must be a very common search term and I don't get any adverts whatsoever.
Does this mean that nobody has bid on this keyword (because it's too expensive?) or are some search terms simply not allowed to be advertised on?
Most navigational queries fall into this class.
"computer networking" yields 1 ad. "networking" yields no ads.
I've had worse, because I wanted to have 100 results in a page.
http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-...
It's good to be the king.
The room that is taken up by the left and right columns also are welcome. I sometimes find exactly what I am looking for in the right column. I actually wish Google gave more information and less site links as results.
I think some screen real-estate could be saved by simply tightening the padding. I see a lot of areas that are blank. It would be really nice if the content was allowed to take some of this dead space.
If you think advertising is going away or getting scaled back any time soon, you're fooling yourself. Just block them and stop thinking about it. Now if only they could invent Adblock for Reality....
GoogleMonkeyR - a Greasemonkey that breaks SERP ads and instant search and allows you to format them to your liking.
Could somebody do this for other sites?
Nowadays, you can't even see what keywords are driving traffic to your site if users are logged in (50% of queries or so). Plus it's hard to even correlated your SEO efforts with rankings because Google does stuff like drop your rankings randomly so you don't know what works.
And therefore they would have to increase your rankings randomly as well?
I don't see Google, Facebook Ads and many more, AdBlock knows what.
2011 / May2010 / pre-May2010
(thumbnails are from searchpreview extension)
I don't use AdBlock, don't really see the reason to as I find most of the search ads to be relevant whenever I'm searching for a term that actually shows search ads (which isn't really that often). Hate for search ads just because they are ads is kind of an odd imo ...
That's almost certainly on purpose to get better ad click ratio. Google manually inspects all major keywords, you can bet "credit cards," "mortgage" and "insurance" are tweaked and tweaked to Google's specification. Showing "bofa.com" when searching for mortgage isn't that useful to the average user, so people click on ads.
now its about 42 min show, 18 min commercials