Excuse Me, But Where Did Google's Organic Search Results Go? | Hacker News Reader

Excuse Me, But Where Did Google's Organic Search Results Go?

seobook.com

76 pointsstakent50 comments

I'm sorry, but this is a bunch of SEO guys whining about the fact that their dubiously useful sites they spent lots of time trying to move up Google's ranking are no longer at the top of the page.

When most people search for "san francisco dentists," why wouldn't they want locations and phone numbers of some of these dentists presented right upfront? This is no different than what Bing, Yahoo and even Duck Duck Go are doing, and there's nothing wrong with making the result page more useful for people without them having to click away.

Sure, Google has been getting a little too spammy with the amount of ads in the yellow box, but complaining when they surface Youtube videos or maps is ridiculous. Nine times out of 10, that's exactly what the user is looking for.

I didn't see much whining in here.

Aaron is pointing out that there might be big changes coming to far and away the biggest source of referral traffic on the web.

I probably don't have to spell this out for you, but it's a big deal if Google shifts focus from driving traffic to other sites, to driving traffic to its own sites.

All the links on the right of the map go straight to the remote sites in question. That's still where Google is driving the traffic.

No people aren't actually always looking for Youtube videos. Do you know how many times a big viral video hits and Youtube has to remove it due to copyright and ownership issues? Now you have worthless Youtube video results when you just want the actual video. This is just one example of when Google will put their product in your face without regard to what you want.

That particular example was hilariously sad. Almost reminded me of late 90s.

Good news is, if Google gets too aggressive with their ads, Bing(or someone else) will be happy to take over.

Incidentally, I do not get the same polluted results Aaron got, when using simple search from Firefox. I just get Google Map thing, single side Adword on the side and the rest are organic results. Most likely reason is that I am too far from San Francisco right now...

Personally, when I do a local search query, seeing short listings on a map with ratings and a phone number is pretty much exactly what I was looking for even though it doesn't meet the author's definition of 'organic'.

A map with ratings and a phone number is exactly what I want; unfortunately I'm also getting two full-bar text ads and another 4 pay-for-placement local search ads before I get to that. Combined they take up nearly 800 pixels of vertical space, a user experience so terrible and un-Googley that I have to assume it's an error.

Update: seconds after posting this, I refreshed and the full-bar ads went away. Have they just fixed the results?

Update: seconds after posting this, I refreshed and the full-bar ads went away. Have they just fixed the results?

Nope, the GoogleMind probably crawled the site, and upon discovering your dissatisfaction with the ads, updated your personalized results appropriately ;)

I don't think so. It looks like subsequent refreshes of the same query lower the number of sponsored links shown. I searched for "San Francisco dentists" (I'm in the Bay Area) and I got exactly what was shown in the article. Refreshed a few times, and the number of sponsored links shown was decremented by one each time until, until it got down to just the four small 2x2 ads.

Got the same behavior searching "Palo Alto dentists", though the number of sponsored links started lower.

From the article: "Update: it looks like Google claimed the phone number removal was a bug, but weird timing that the bug appeared at the same time they started selling premium local ads that appear on the regular search results."

Why is it weird timing that a bug would appear when a system is being modified? Isn't that pretty much when most bugs are introduced?

Umm, don't you think they have a regression test that checks if everything that's supposed to be displayed in a search result is actually displayed?

Seems like they're stretching the definition of bug here. Maybe a bug in the specification, almost certainly not in the code.

A fair point... I still think it's more likely for stuff to break when you're tinkering it with than when you're not.

You have a lot of faith in QA ;)

Wow, AdBlock makes Google better. I didn't know this was going on.

This has been a trend for me. I've even moved away from using AdBlock, but I still use NoScript, and it's still amazing.

It often surprises me how different some websites look on other people's computers. It makes me realize that advertising really does change the user experience, especially when they're the animated flash ads. A nice, relaxing read suddenly becomes flashy, distracting, and obnoxious.

That's gold for someone who wants to develop opt in/non intrusive ads. Thanks Periodic, I felt the same way but building ads that are "desirable" to the user experience is a challenge.

I think even if you get the organic results, they are not organic enough.

I searched for "django video tutorial" earlier today. The first organic result? A link to the official django docs and that page does not even include the word "video".

Unfortunately you gotta do this these days: +django +video +tutorial

http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bdjango+%2Bvideo+%2Btutoria...

There's probably a Greasemonkey script for this somewhere that can automatically get this old behavior back for you.

When did they change that? I remember when altavista used "or" by default, and then came google which did the (controversial for the time) "and". And it actually did work better!

And now we are back to "or"? Why? So many times I'm not happy with the results because of that.

My first result for the same search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=django+video+tutorial

was this page:

http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/video?name=1100000&fr...

Is it possible they fixed the results since you searched?

Peronsalized search and different data centers depending on location make a difference. I received the same result as you.

Aren't the map results organic?

Just because they're displayed in a different form doesn't make them any less organic.

It looks like the results are actually good. If you are searching for dentists in a particular area, chances are you would also like to see them on a map.

To me it is a case of Google trying to give a good search result - but using another Google app. And in the bargain raising eyebrows. But if you compare it with Bing, the difference between ads and results on Bing is even harder to make out.

I am sure this will draw antitrust eyebrows too. Here Google of course is promoting their map application with local listings and reviews. They might actually believe that it is the best way out there to give local listings with reviews etc. But it kind of forces everyone to add reviews in Google map which in turn will actually become the best even it is not right now. And apps like yelp will slowly be forced out of reckoning.

except that maps returns reviews from non-google sites. search maps for "localino atlanta" to see what I mean.

I thought everybody had agreed that "above the fold" means nothing.

Yes, all the recent user research we've done (I work at Yahoo) says that users have got a lot more comfortable with scrolling since Nielsen's original research in the 90s. We officially Do Not Care About The Fold now.

Anecdotally, for some applications (documentation, news) a single really long document is preferred to lots of pagination. I haven't seen research to that effect though.

I thought that above-the-fold still has to do with first impressions. If I get to a website and I see a link that I looks a mostly-like-what-I-want, but a link that is definitely-what-I-want is further down the page, I'll probably click the mostly-like-what-I-want link because I saw it first and it looks "good enough."

Let's do a thought experiment. If you put the ads all at the top of the page, and all the non-ad search results below the fold you'd probably get a reasonable click rate on the ads. Now, let's think about if we put all the non-ad search results above the fold, and all the ads down at the bottom. Do you think people would get to those ads and read them nearly as much?

> I thought that above-the-fold still has to do with first impressions.

Sure, the original version (lets call it the "strong" version), was based on the idea that "Users don't scroll", but now we know they do, so the strong version has fallen.

The weak version could well be to do with first impressions, part of a more general, "Put the most important stuff first" rule.

I distinctly remember a forum I used to post to, where they put very large banner ads at the top of every page. I'd have started scrolling before the page finished loading - you soon learn where the real content is on a page. Add in "banner blindness", and all bets are off.

Hence the increasing popularity of putting ads between sections of content... I'm looking at you, StackOverflow.

I bet it has to do with improved mice. Having to move towards the \/ and keep hitting that to scroll = pain in the ass.

Now you just click on the mouse wheel and scroll

That's really interesting. I've always assumed it was a knowledge / teaching problem, but I'd forgotten how much the addition of mousewheels changed my entire browsing experience.

I never understood that preference, actually. In the early/mid 90s the connections were sporadic, and I always preferred to get the entire page when I (finally) got a working connection. If I found a page that I had to follow links to keep reading, the experience was often read->click->wait............read->click->wait.......... I personally preferred downloading an enormous page, even going away from the computer for a few minutes, but then having it all available.

It sounds like we need a Culling Of the Fold: http://www.google.com/search?q=culling+of+the+fold

Thanks for the free song, Google.

Not exactly, as I read it. In the Nielsen studies about the fold, I thought the takeaway was that users didn't realize they could/should scroll, and that this is no longer a problem.

That doesn't mean that what content appears above the fold has no effect on the bounce rate or user experience. If all I see above the fold are ads, I'm moving on. Of course, this is Google, so they can get away with significantly more than most.

It's natural for an SEO to be concerned with organic results appearing over the fold. It's the part that SEO's manipulate to their profit.

The rest of us should take a step back and think about actual quality of the results. Now there are a lot of ads on that page, but are the organic results going to be more useful then the Google Maps matches? For a query like "dentist" I think Maps could be a better source for answers.

If you search for "dentists london", there are no organic results above the fold (on my screen)!

There is clearly a Google-risk in many markets -- especially those dealing with content and aggregation. It's hard to compete with the massive scale that Google has at its fingertips. They can quickly enter many markets, outside of their core, if they choose to do so. Most of the time (but not always) they will become a major competitor. Think GMail, Voice, Mobile Maps, etc.

I wonder how long it will take them to get slapped by someone though? In the UK papers have to clearly identify adverts if presented in an editorial format. Why do google get away with presenting adverts as search results without clearly identifying them?

A greyed out 'sponsored link' in the right hand corner is just pathetic, I bet most users don't even understand what that means.

That's how US papers identify advertisements, too. Fortune has a multi-page article on how effective corporate jets are (it actually has about as much data and case studies as a typical Fortune article), and that piece has a modest "Special advertising section" header.

However, organic and natural results are both the result of spending money and effort; the only difference is the that you can get high organic results without much money, if you have a lot of time.

It might take a while before Google get negative wide spread reaction or loose of revenue just due their reputation build over the years and innovative drive. However, in competitive market and emerge of hungry start ups looking for new business it might come as an opportunity for others

Not sure why this was downvoted, good point I think

Do you remember what Web 1.0 was like before Google? Search engines would often mix sponsored links into their results with no indication at all that the link had paid for their placement. Google at least puts them in a separate section of the page, labeled.

Google wasn't the first to do that.

For many terms as well they're featuring Youtube at the top . So not only are they getting users to ignore organic SEO results. They're driving traffic to their properties.

That's the point though, right? They show results for Youtube, Google Maps, Google News, etc. so they can keep you on their websites to look at more ads. The more ads they show, the more money they get.

It would be nice to see the history of a search over time from the inception of Google to the present (with the same keyword search).

When you're in the barn, its hard to smell the odors - so having this progressive timeline is probably the only way to objectively see how much ground we are really losing.

Even more alarming is when Google sprinkles shopping links inside the organic results! I recently did a search for "calculator" and the 3rd listing (inside the organic list) was a Google shopping box of links.

This really upset me, but what can we do?

I think you are confused. Google shopping results are not paid advertisements.

Search results are their property and Google can do what it wants with it. I don't get it... Why are people so surprised by Google monetizing traffic? Wouldn't you?