
Fewer Than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click - adamcarson
https://sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches-now-result-in-a-click/
======
cyrusshepard
I think what folks are missing is that a lot of these "zero-click" searches
happen as a result of Google scraping your website, and displaying the results
as a "featured snippet."

Yes, they link to you below the featured snippet.

No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your
website and displayed it right in their search results.

For example: If I'm searching for "best nail for cedar wood" Google gives me
the answer: STAINLESS STEEL - and I never had to click through to the website
that gave the answer: [https://bit.ly/2MdovdP](https://bit.ly/2MdovdP)

• Yes, this is good for users (it would also be good for users if Netflix gave
away movies free)

• Overall, the publishers who "rank" for this query receive fewer clicks

• Google earns more ad revenue as users stick around on Google longer

Ironically, Google has a policy against scraping their results, but their
whole business model is predicated off scraping other sites and making money
off the content - in many cases never sending traffic (or significantly
reduced traffic) to the publisher of the content.

~~~
gniv
I disagree. There is an implicit contract between website publishers and
search engines that it’s ok to do this. The website can set nosnippet in
robots if they want to not have the snippet in search results.

~~~
milesskorpen
It's a faustian bargin. Google is so powerful you can't do without them, but
they're also inexorably eating your future.

~~~
Silhouette
_Google is so powerful you can 't do without them_

I wonder how true that assumption really is any more. The quality of traffic
Google drives to sites I operate is very low compared to all other major
sources, with much less engagement by any metric you like, notably including
conversions. The only reliable exception is when we're running marketing
campaigns in other places, which often result in spikes in both direct
visitors landing on our homepage and search engine visitors arriving at our
general landing pages.

There is this conventional wisdom that SEO, and in particular playing by
Google's rules to rank highly in its results pages, is the only way you can
run a viable commercial site these days. Our experience has been exactly the
opposite: our SEO is actually quite effective, in that we do rank very highly
for many relevant search terms, but it makes a relatively small contribution
to anything that matters. And really, when I write "SEO" here, I'm only
talking about general good practices like being fast, having a good
information architecture and working well on different devices. We don't
change the structure of our pages just because Google's latest blog post says
X or Y is now considered a "best practice" or anything like that.

Of course I have no way to know how representative our experience is. YMMV.

~~~
milesskorpen
It is a very significant part of our business.

------
ocdtrekkie
This is the subtle truth that I've seen a few folks on Twitter talking about
for the past year or so: That Google has slowly but steadily reduced both the
outbound clicks to other websites, but also the portion of their revenue
that's based on ads hosted by other websites, while bringing both the
"results" and the ad placements in-house, where they no longer have to pay out
a share to site owners.

Whereas Google was previously a way for sites to be discovered and for sites
to generate revenue, it is increasingly becoming the sole source system where
data is scraped and imported into Google, and Google keeps all of the revenue
to itself.

~~~
luckylion
> Whereas Google was previously a way for sites to be discovered and for sites
> to generate revenue, it is increasingly becoming the sole source system
> where data is scraped and imported into Google, and Google keeps all of the
> revenue to itself.

I wondered yesterday: if you provide microdata, Google scrapes it, and you
later decide to remove your sites from Google - is Google allowed to keep the
microdata and continue to publish it?

~~~
michaelmrose
If you once communicated the fact that 2+2 is 4 and Joe makes very good
spaghetti you own the copyright to the text you published but neither the fact
nor the opinion belongs to you in any meaningful way nor should it.

~~~
luckylion
That's true, but a collection of facts ("a database") falls under copyright.

~~~
wongarsu
Not sure why you are downvoted. In the EU databases fall under copyright,
which indeed leaves the question how google legally deals with this
(technically database right isn't copyright, but in this context that's a
technicality).

Also, to quote from the Wikipedia article [1]: An owner has the right to
object to the copying of substantial parts of their database, even if data is
extracted and reconstructed piecemeal

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right)

~~~
Dylan16807
> Not sure why you are downvoted.

Because they didn't say "in the EU", and it not being copyright is not just a
technicality. Copyright is about creative expression, and utilitarian
collections of facts aren't.

~~~
wongarsu
> Because they didn't say "in the EU"

They also didn't say "in the US". From context you can only assume "in some
jurisdiction google cares about"

> Copyright is about creative expression

That's not true, or at least a very US-centric view. The Berne Convention, the
international standard for copyright, reads:

"[...] shall include every production in the literary, scientific and artistic
domain, whatever may be the mode or form of its expression, such as books,
[...] works expressed by a process analogous to photography; works of applied
art; illustrations, maps, plans, sketches and three-dimensional works relative
to geography, topography, architecture or science."

also

"Collections of literary or artistic works such as encyclopaedias and
anthologies which, by reason of the selection and arrangement of their
contents, constitute intellectual creations shall be protected as such"

That's lots of things that are not exactly "creative expression" (even though
exceptions for pure statements of fact do exist).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention)

[https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/283698](https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/283698)

~~~
Dylan16807
"by reason of the selection and arrangement of their contents"

If there was no selection or you make the original selection irrelevant, while
also giving your own arrangement, then there's no violation of copyright.

------
tommoor
My main takeaway from this was where the hell are they getting that data? A
little digging… apparently if you install Avast antivirus they're tracking all
of this and selling /providing to Jumpshot - wow.

> Baker said Jumpshot’s data comes from 100 million devices worldwide, whose
> users have downloaded free security software from partner Avast. The devices
> include smartphones, laptops and tablets.

[https://marketingland.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-
amazon-...](https://marketingland.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-
purchasing-data-other-digital-consumer-insights-to-marketers-246941)

~~~
quickthrower2
I'm sticking with my "don't install antivirus" policy. My exception is
Malwarebytes which I don't consider a regular AV.

Even my fave from 10 years ago AVG seems user hostile (try turning it off,
it's not easy!). I'd hate to see what the other's are doing.

~~~
doh
Avast acquired AVG back in 2016. So yes, all that data ends up in the same
company.

------
cletus
So a common trope in the startup world is the difference between a feature and
a company, the idea being that lots of features are masquerading as companies.
This inevitably leads to them being shocked--SHOCKED--when some bigger player
adds that feature, eating their lunch.

I feel the same way about a lot of outbound sites on Google. There are a bunch
of things I just don't want to go to another site for. Off the top of my head:

\- Exchange rates. Although this one I find infuriating because Google doesn't
know how to correctly round off exchange rates (as in, there's a standard).
This manifests as, say, showing 2 decimal places for AUD/USD when they should
be showing 4.

\- Calculator

\- Mortgage calculator

\- Song lyrics

That sort of thing. If you go to any sites that provide these sorts of things
they're typically "scummy". Lots of ads, lots of Javascript, lots of dark
patterns to make you load more page views (eg a mortgage calculator that'll
mysteriously take 3 steps/page loads to calculate).

I'm glad these are in search results, typically in significantly better
versions. And I don't think anyone who runs a site built around a basic
formula for interest calculations has any right to complain about it.

Of course this will be painted as "where does it end?" but not every surface
is a slippery slope.

Just look at the likes of Yelp who complains about Google "stealing" their
content. Well, Yelp is about one of the scummiest businesses out there. So I
won't feel sorry for them, not now, not ever.

The one weird case here is AMP. Like I get Google's motivations here. Many
companies develop terrible mobile sites that run badly or not at all and AMP
IS much faster, generally speaking. Yet still it seems so heavyhanded with
seemingly no opt out (on the consumer or publisher side). I don't really
understand why Google wants to die on this particular hill.

~~~
puranjay
I understand your stand, but what Google did with its featured snippets is
essentially a form of bait and switch. It encouraged entrepreneurs and
creators to create content that could answer specific queries with the promise
that Google will drive traffic to their sites.

Now Google is using the same content and depriving them of the traffic.

That's pretty scummy in my opinion.

~~~
SilasX
Hm, I think there's scumminess on both sides, since (as GP noted) even simple
sites (e.g. for lyrics) are bloated and unusable.

Before:

User: Hey Google, what's the monthly payment on a 20-year mortgage with 3.9%
APR?

Google: Oh, MortgateSite would know, go there.

MortgageSite: Here's your calculator.

User: Okay, let me put in the numbers ... awesome, thanks! Oh, neat, they can
hook me up with lenders. Let me take a look.

MortgageSite: Thanks for the referral, Google!

Everyone wins.

Today, it's more like:

User: Hey Google, what's the monthly payment on a 20-year mortgage with 3.9%
APR?

Google: Oh, that would be this much: ... . Here are some sites where you can
dig deeper.

User: Um, okay, might be worth a look. Let's try MortgageSite.

MortgageSite: uhhhhhhh hold on a second. Hey, see our BUY THIS PRODUCT
mortgage calculator. AND THIS ONE

User: Uh, okay, I'll just type in--

MortgageSite: HEY! It looks like you're new to this site. Want to get on our
mailing list?

User: You know what? Screw it.

MortgageSite: Confound you, Google, for stealing our traffic!

~~~
TeMPOraL
Perfect world:

User: Hey Gateway, what's the monthly payment on a 20-year mortgage with 3.9
APR?

Gateway: Here's your calculator, already prefilled with the data taken from
your query.

Done.

The problem with all these little sites is, besides bloat, that the "Oh, neat,
they can hook me up with lenders. Let me take a look." ends up with user
getting malware and/or scammed. The problem with Google is that they can
hardly be trusted at this point to do things like this in the interest of
users. They want to be the frontend through which you access the Internet.

I used the word "Gateway" in my example as a placeholder; my imaginary perfect
world recognizes that things like "currency conversion", "song lyrics" or
"mortgage calculator" are data[0], which should be separate from the frontend
used to access it. I dream of the Internet where things like these are API-
driven and do not involve loading anything other than what's requested -
neither ads, nor "value-adds", and definitely not all the rest of the webpage
surrounding a mortgage calculator, which is bloat obstructing requested
functionality.

\--

[0] - yes, even mortgage calculator; it's a mathematical model, an algorithm,
and code is data.

~~~
rubidium
[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what%27s+the+monthly+p...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what%27s+the+monthly+payment+on+a+20-year+mortgage+with+3.9+APR)

You're dreaming of what wolfram alpha is trying to build.

Edit: funnily enough, they parsed the input slightly wrong but you can quickly
get to your answer.

~~~
joe5150
works perfectly if you put a percent sign after 3.9

------
scott_s
The presumption here, as I understand is, is that a zero-click search happened
because Google used one of their inline apps to answer a question. (For
example, if I search "population of new york city", I get a big and bold
answer along with a graph that shows NYC's population over time, as well as LA
and Chicago.)

But I'm not convinced that's necessarily true. I frequently search for things
to get a general idea of what is out there, and I only skim the results. This
is also something I do when I'm _refining_ my search terms. It may take me
several iterations to refine my terms until I find something I want to click
through to. In this process, I may have three or four no-click searches before
I land on a good query, and _then_ I start clicking.

~~~
ergothus
I've also had several fights with google over my refinements.

If I search for 2 words, odds are stupidly high that most of the results will
NOT include one of my two words. Thanks Google, for deciding I didn't really
mean to type that.

I follow up with added quotes, etc to enforce what I actually typed, so there
will be a lot of Google-induced churn.

Google has focused so highly on the peak that more and more searches -
certainly the majority of mine - have been relegated to the long tail.

~~~
bitL
DuckDuckGo is lately behaving the same way... Time to find another alternative
I guess.

~~~
Semaphor
DDG is worse, sadly. Unlike Google, they don't tell you they ignored part of
your query. And for Google forcing a term is a strong signal and it will show
to in the snippet most of the time. For DDG forcing a term is a weak signal
and it will often not show up in the snippet and sometimes not at all.

I love DDG because of their bangs, but their "let me tell you what you
actually wanted to search for"-attitude is pissing me off.

------
gumby
I'm trying to really understand the problem here.

I do understand that people want clicks to their site so that they can get ad
views, and that those ad view payments are what pay the hosting bill and
reimburse for the effort of generating the info.

Yet from a UX PoV, I simply want to know the airspeed of an unladen swallow. I
don't want to click to learn it. That additional friction doesn't improve my
user experience, it improves someone else's. Mandating that would turn Google
into a splash screen or landing page, and we've gotten rid of those anti
patterns for good reasons.

I chose my toy example (unladen swallow) because it's an example where nuance
is required (African or European?) and if google's answer box were to obscure
that it would be wrong. But if answers that with a "two answers: African x
European y, and click here to know more" that is a user-friendly model.

Really objecting to google doing this is like objecting to an ad blocker IMHO.
Ad blockers upset sites, but make users happy.

(anti disclaimer and disclaimer: I am not a fan of google, use DDG, and my
company has ditched all google services. OTOH my gf works there, though not on
anything related to search.)

~~~
buboard
Napster also made users happy. And bittorrent. And libgen. Why the double
standard?

~~~
telotortium
I like all the things you listed :)

More seriously, from a moral standpoint, I would argue that what's at most a
short paragraph extract from a website falls under fair use. I don't believe
any site is entitled to clicks from Google's search results page, certainly
not for such short snippets, which I believe don't exhibit the level of
creativity that deserves denying the right to copy to others. By contrast, the
other sites you listed provide copies of significantly longer and more
creative works.

(Googler, though not in search or ads)

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
A dictionary is a collection of short snippets. I find it hard to believe that
showing those snippets for whatever word you search falls under fair use. The
people doing the hard work of making a dictionary deserve to serve those
definitions under their own terms. Or at least some combination of their terms
and the user's terms, instead of just google's terms.

~~~
telotortium
> The people doing the hard work of making a dictionary deserve to serve those
> definitions under their own terms.

This depends on the country. In the EU, this may be the case. However, the US
Supreme Court rejected the "sweat of the brow" copyright doctrine in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co%46).
For a creative expression to be copyrightable in the US, it must have some
minimum threshold of originality.

The wording of dictionary definitions themselves may be copyrightable if
sufficiently unique. But the question of fair use should be considered as
well. If Google as a matter of policy always consulted a particular database
for a particular class of searches, without permission from the copyright
owner, perhaps one could argue that crosses the line of fair use. But for
isolated results, it doesn't appear much different than the current practice
of putting snippets of the page below the links in the search results. For
more extensive databases, Google often has an explicit agreement with the
database owner.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I don't know anything about the implementation
of the answer box, and certainly don't know the law in multiple jurisdictions.

~~~
mthoms
It sounds like you're looking for legal loopholes. Which is _absolutely_ fine
for a business to do. Just don't use phrases like _" from a moral
standpoint..."_ when you really mean _" from a legal standpoint..."_.

Moral and legal aren't the same thing.

~~~
telotortium
I don't believe Google has a moral obligation to send traffic to the sites
that appear in its search results, any more than a book has an obligation to
be bought or borrowed from the library by the readers of a short quote from
that book in another book. So, for me, it is a moral question as well.

~~~
buboard
> don't believe Google has a moral obligation to send traffic

Bizzare. The only reason google gets traffic is because of those sites. Your
comparison is also off, google is not another book (they dont create content),
it's the librarian telling people which book to borrow.

------
mips_avatar
Article should be: Avast antivirus users click less than half of google
searches. Their data isn’t representative of the market broadly. For one thing
Microsoft claims bing has 9% market share, while avast pegs it as 1.4% market
share.
[https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/8982080475...](https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/898208047578849280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E898208047578849280&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2Fajax%2Finset%2Fiframe%3Fid%3Dtwitter-898208047578849280%26autosize%3D1)

~~~
persistent
It's even more biased than this because it's desktop-only, Windows-only
population. Mobile is HUGE.

~~~
avian
From the article's "Methodology notes":

> That includes millions of Android-powered devices and millions of PCs as
> well. They have much lower coverage on iOS devices and so don’t report on
> visit data from those browsers.

I'm not saying that their sample is not heavily biased, but they do claim that
it's not a desktop-only dataset.

~~~
persistent
My mistake. I didn't realize anyone was stupid enough to put an antivirus on
an Android. Please amend my complaint to say that the sample is biased toward
morons.

------
ibudiallo
I have a particular page on my blog that mostly appear as the answer to a
question "Can you do X with Y tool". Before Google started displaying it as a
snippet, the post was getting decent traffic, and the comments were more
somewhat moderate.

Then the snippet appeared, and a bunch of negative comments started to appear.
To clarify, my answer was not a solid yes or no, but more of my experience
with the tool. But Google snippets conveniently answers with a section that
says: "It is pointless."

User's read the snippet, are enraged, click, don't bother to read the article,
jump to the comment and say "YOU ARE WRONG."

Now, the controversy brings a decent amount of traffic. But unfortunately, the
traffic is not from people reading in the first place.

------
egypturnash
Article: "Throughout this post, I’ll be using numbers from the clickstream
data company, Jumpshot. They are, in my opinion, the best, most reliable
source of information on what happens inside web browsers because of how they
gather, process, and scale their estimates."

Me: How do they get this data. This is some pretty thorough data on a site
they don't own.

Article: "Jumpshot is the data arm of Avast, a well-regarded maker of numerous
Internet security products. This suite of products, in order to function,
_must collect and analyze every URL visited by every browser of every machine
on which its installed_. [...]

Article: "Because Avast has to see and process all these URLs anyway (in order
to serve their function of providing web security), they anonymize, aggregate,
and remove any personally-identifiable information from the browser URL visits
and then provide them to Jumpshot, who then makes estimates about broad web
usage behavior."

...I hate this world. Everyone's tracking you. Everyone's selling you to
advertisers.

~~~
baroffoos
* Every corporation

There are still plenty of individuals working on projects not driven by money
which respect your privacy.

------
ac29
For those who skipped the article, this data is exclusively from users who
installed Avast "security" products, which apparently are sufficiently
invasive that they get this sort of data and sell it to third parties.

The article thinks this dataset is close enough to representative to present
their conclusions as more or less facts. I'm not sure I'd make the same
conclusion.

~~~
mips_avatar
I don’t trust the avast data. According to Microsoft bing has 9% market share.
While avast data shows it as 1.4%.
[https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/8982080475...](https://mobile.twitter.com/MSFTAdvertising/status/898208047578849280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E898208047578849280&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fgizmodo.com%2Fajax%2Finset%2Fiframe%3Fid%3Dtwitter-898208047578849280%26autosize%3D1)

~~~
acheofgrass
You trust Microsoft's number here? 33% market share in the US? I

~~~
mips_avatar
I trust Microsoft and avast to not lie about facts as they can get in big
trouble for that. Rather I don’t believe this data from avast is indicative of
the market broadly.

------
saddestcatever
Does anyone else use search at least a dozen times a day just for
spellchecking a word or confirming a phrase? I find myself pasting phrases
into the search bar when autocorrect or spellcheck just doesn't do the trick.
I'd love to know what percentage of "searches" were never actually looking for
a target.

~~~
stebann
Yes, absolutely. This is very common strategy among folks whom are working
with different languages. Also looking for confirmation in "reverse
dictionaries" because Google mistranslates some words.

------
michaelterryio
The problem seems apparent to me. Google has a monopoly on websites being able
to promote themselves.

There are plenty of other channels, but none with remotely the reach or trust
of the US's overwhelmingly dominant search engine.

By dint of this fact, they can steal the content of those who actually
produced it. What are you going to do, deindex your site? That's death,
because Google is a monopoly.

In the short term it seems good for the end user. But in the long term, Google
having a monopoly on distributing the world's information seems like an
obvious threat.

~~~
guyzero
"Google has a monopoly on websites being able to promote themselves."

Incredibly far from the truth.

"There are plenty of other channels"

Yep.

------
laputan_machine
I don't think I understand this concept.

If I search for something using Google, and don't click on a link, doesn't
that mean my search was fruitless? What else do we mean by 'zero-click
searches'?

Edit: Unless it's the simple '6 x 10' or 'What is the time in London', in
which case, are we surprised these queries are handled by $SearchEngine? DDG
does the same thing (albeit, uses a third party website and gives credit)

~~~
8ytecoder
Example query - “Leonardo DiCaprio‘s net worth”. While previously this would
have resulted in a click to the top website that put in the effort to compile
this information, now google would highlight that exact sentence with the
answer right there. The site loses a click through and any potential revenue.

~~~
avocado4
Consumers win in this scenario.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Do they really though? See my comments on:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688022)

Essentially, if Google's data source isn't getting paid, the data source is
not going to remain accurate, and hence, neither will Google.

~~~
Nasrudith
I don't see the relationship either way between payment and accuracy.

Paying people is no guarantee of accuracy in either direction. Heck paying
people for it encourages putting any ole bullshit there to farm it.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Websites which have gone out of business cannot provide Google updated data.

------
jasode
As another poster mentioned, it seems logical that some reduction in click-
thru-rate happens because of Google's "Featured Snippets"[0]. The Google
search results page shows an extract of a web page that likely answers the web
surfer's query. We don't know what % of zero clicks was caused by the snippets
info box.

[0]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=google+search+"featured+snip...](https://www.google.com/search?q=google+search+"featured+snippets"&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

~~~
munk-a
I also occasionally use google as a spell checker or to run a quick
calculation.

------
ryanmercer
To be fair a lot of the time I can get the info I need directly from the
search.

\- I use Google as a calculator and a unit of measure converter including
currency

\- I don't hesitate to "define WORD" when I don't know a word which gets
displayed at the top

\- What is the capital/population/square miles of

\- Who is/cast of/CHARACTERNAME actor

\- What muscles are used with movement/machine

\- synonym/antonym WORD

\- SONG lyrics/"turn off your mind relax and float down stream" song/'Tomorrow
Never Knows' band

Actually, every single time I open a Google tab I query "define define" first
so that I have the search bar at the top and not in the center of the page.
Don't judge me, you do weird stuff too.

~~~
slx26
if google is your default search engine, just click CTRL + L and write what
you want to search.

pretty much all browsers support CTRL+L, CTRL+T, CTRL+W, CTRL+(SHIFT)+TAB...
which are really useful

------
andrerm
And with AMP, Google is trying ti do the same with entire sites.

In the long run why will we continue to produce content for Google?

Google must stop trying to suck the hole world into itself. Google is starting
to look like a black hole.

And the "it is good for consumers" or "users like it" are just offensive. It's
good for Google. It may be good for users today but it's bad for content
producers and in the long run it's bad for everyone.

~~~
lern_too_spel
All the other major search engines also use snippets and AMP precisely because
users want it. Should all of them stop too? Can you clearly define the
regulation you are proposing to impose on search engines?

------
QUFB
I've actually lost traffic on [https://wtfismyip.com/](https://wtfismyip.com/)
since Google started doing this:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=wtf+is+my+ip](https://www.google.com/search?q=wtf+is+my+ip)

~~~
judge2020
It might help to say "what is my regular IP address" since so many that search
this don't want their IPv6.

------
jnaddef
When I read the title I thought it was going to be an article praising Google,
but the author seems to actually think less clicks is bad?

I remember back in the early 2000s when I had to click through 1st to 10th
result trying to find what I was looking for, sometimes even having to go to
2nd page of results.

Now I use search for everything : name of a built-in function, quick
calculation, checking the spelling or wording of a sentence, short biography
of someone... For none of that I will need to click on the result because the
answer is given to me without needing to click anything.

~~~
jnaddef
I would still recommend clicking on the link for coding issues, sometimes the
algorithm will get you a snippet of SO's accepted answer even though it is not
correct : [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20149304/how-to-set-
the-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20149304/how-to-set-the-xmx-when-
start-running-a-jar-file/20149394)

~~~
zuuow
The correct answer in SO questions is always the most voted one, not the
accepted one. I always check for that. I _think_ I've seen SO recently sort
the answers of a certain question by number of votes by default but I might be
wrong

------
hinkley
It feels to me like the SEO optimizing folks have gotten out ahead of Google's
algorithm. I've been getting back into an old hobby and looking for where to
buy supplies or advice on which supplies to buy and it's just all spam, fake
sites and low quality products.

And it occurs to me that I've been experiencing a lesser version of this for
years. Google search just isn't working for me anymore.

~~~
codingslave
Lots of people in this thread claiming that google is slipping, focusing on
the wrong metrics, etc. But I agree, google is losing the battle against SEO
and its a really hard battle to win. Eventually there will need to be a shift
away from search as we know it to win this game.

------
dna_polymerase
As bad as this sounds, I got to say I'm not even mad. The instant answers
Google provides seem to come from websites that are mostly unusable, bloated
with tracking and other BS that increase load times, and even worse SEO-
content (that stuff that repeats words just to have more "relevant" keywords).
I don't feel too bad about those pages losing traffic.

Longform content, interactive content, blogs, videos, forums and social
networks (generally pages you might want to spend more time on) seem to be
mostly unaffected.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The issue you are missing is that the sites Google stole that information from
often invested money in gathering it.

The CelebrityNetWorth example: [https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-
ate-celebritynet...](https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-
celebritynetworth-com)

If Google kills CelebrityNetWorth's revenue, Google no longer can scrape
updated data from CelebrityNetWorth, because they killed it already. So Google
data gets worse or remains static, which quickly becomes inaccurate.

The EU is attempting to fix this issue with the so-called "link tax" everyone
has claimed is horrible for the Internet, but really, it's a way to correct
the industry. For Google to have good information to scrape, the content
creators need to be fairly compensated for that, or else the whole thing falls
apart.

Because right now, what Google has done, is acted as a parasite, but a poor
one, that actually kills its host.

~~~
cannedslime
Instead of an impossible to implement link tax, how about we just made it
illegal for search engines to provide these kinds of "pirate" snippets without
an opt-in... Either show meta desc, or don't show it at all. Adjust results by
relevancy and pagerank (as they used to do) and everyone is happy.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
There's nothing impossible to implement about it, but the marketing from the
opposition has been really strong. It isn't even a link tax, for example, but
it's detractors have pretty successfully rebranded it.

~~~
cannedslime
No you are right, its going to be super easy, barely an inconvenience! I give
you that link tax is misleading its more like a snippet tax, right?

------
knorker
> Maybe I need to stop being disappointed in Google and just start expecting
> them to lie, mislead, and refuse direct questions

Why exactly is it in Google's best interests to reveal internal competitive
trade secrets just because someone asked? Or any company, for that matter. If
a company discloses information it's because they think they'll gain more from
disclosing it than from not disclosing it. So why should you demand that all
companies answer all your questions?

I'd be interested in examples of _lies_ , though.

------
encoderer
There was a time you could build a meaningful business largely on SEO. (See:
Yelp, Zillow). No longer.

~~~
gscott
Especially now that organic results often don't even show up without scrolling
down. I miss the good old days when being the #1 search result meant
something!

~~~
patrioticaction
And also because they've slowly made sponsored results look like organic
results to align better with their becoming evil OKRs:
[https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-
goog...](https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-google-
bing-254332)

------
Tactic
Somewhere along the line Google stopped being about finding a website and
instead is about answering a question with the answer sometimes being a
website.

One could argue they have always been an answer engine and they are just
getting more direct and precise.

------
bryanrasmussen
I think another decreasing search type, going by my own example, is the
programming syntax/method name search.

If I can't remember exactly the syntax I can often construct a query precise
enough that the first result shows enough of the syntax in stackoverflow's
accepted answer that I can just proceed from there without clicking through.

------
einpoklum
First thing's first:

\--==[ USE AN AD-BLOCKER ]==--

and never see those Google top and ads, and widgets, and what-not, again. I
use EFF Privacy Badger + uBlock Origin but to each their own.

\----

Now ... the charts are very interesting, but are a misrepresentation in
several ways (although not necessarily intentionally).

1\. What @cyrusshepard says:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688712)

2\. Preference for more established / larger / more popular websites in the
"organic"/non-ad results. This is something I can't prove, but my and my
acquaintances' experience suggests that, gradually (mostly before the last 5
years, i.e. not a new thing by now), Google has shifted toward tending to
direct you more to those kinds of sights. Perhaps others have studied this.

------
lifeisstillgood
So I maybe failing to grok this but

~45% of google traffic is "organic" \- I search, I find a link I leave google

~5% is as clicks (!)

~50% is zero click - it's common enough a query that google just answers it
right there, flights, trains timetables, cinema, exchange rates

This is kind of a huge shift and also kind of not important at all

Millions of us want, say, cinema listings, and off the back of those listings
might easily buy a ticket. I can see this as a huge business for Google and
certainly disruptive but I am not sure we are losing much by Google vetting
it's dollar instead of the same dollar going to the ticketing company behind a
multiplex

Is this the old fear about microsoft - that all any ISV was doing was market
research for microsoft?

If you are a distribution channel selling a barely differentiated product to
millions of people - well the writing has been on the wall for a while.

------
dageshi
This will likely backfire in the long term. People writing content will shy
away from writing articles on subjects or which answer questions that google
will simply steal and display. Eventually the existing sources will become out
of date and google will begin to serve inaccurate information.

~~~
TekMol
What type of articles would that be? Looking at how complete Wikipedia is, it
seems peoples will to write content for free is kind of unlimited.

Look at HN. Your opinion is free text number 20688220 written here. Ready for
Google to eat. Twenty million texts written. Without any payment at all.

~~~
dageshi
That content will be much much harder to extract and determine authority than
what google is using right now, giving greater chances of it being wrong.

------
rchaud
For me, the issue is not that search queries can now answer simple
calculations or inane celebrity trivia without requiring clickthroughs to ad-
ridden sites.

It's what comes afterwards, when Google inevitably starts answering queries on
complex issues around medicine, politics, society or the economy with a pithy
snippet grabbed from what it's machine learning thought was representative.

We've already seen that vast swathes of the population can have their vote
influenced by Facebook/Twitter posts with a big "Sponsored" tag on them. No
nuance, all invective.

How do you think that will play out when people will take the snippet at its
word and not bother to at least click and get some idea of the author's
possible biases, methodological limitations, etc.?

~~~
judge2020
Google at least seems to be reacting to the Anti-vax and other medical
inaccuracies by policing medical content -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676755)

------
tyingq
Not surprised, but the watch out for Google investors is that all the tricks
for Google revenue growth to outpace general internet growth are all played
out.

You can't _" add more ads"_ above the fold when everything above the fold (for
lucrative searches) is already an ad.

And dropping below 50% of searches don't result in a click is hard. Either for
practical or anti-trust reasons.

So, get used to growth that's tied to internet growth. Which _" ain't so
bad"_, but also _" ain't what it used to be"_.

This cow is milked, so if you want to go back to growth that _exceeds_
expectations, you need a new cow. Search monetization has peaked for the near
future.

------
balozi
A less techie theory: Witness the rise of the Google Skeptical Search user. In
essence, Google search users maybe developing an attitude of skepticism
towards the quality and usefulness of the results they receive. It started
with news searches and its spreading to everything else search related. The
sensing being that Google's search results are not an honest reflection of the
information that is available.

------
kerng
Google, the content thief.

It's amazing how they can get away with this, while at the same time not
allowing others to scrape their sites. The actual content creators probably
see significantly less traffic because of this - without ever knowing what the
actual traffic could have been... there should be some kind of pay it
forward/revenue sharing that Google should do. But that would be not being
evil.

------
mirimir
> This suite of products, in order to function, must collect and analyze every
> URL visited by every browser of every machine on which its installed. ...

That's why these products are privacy nightmares.

Bitdefender has admitted that it compromised a user.[0] That was a major case.
I'm sure that many other users have been hosed, in less newsworthy ways.

> Because Avast has to see and process all these URLs anyway (in order to
> serve their function of providing web security), they anonymize, aggregate,
> and remove any personally-identifiable information from the browser URL
> visits and then provide them to Jumpshot, who then makes estimates about
> broad web usage behavior.

There's no reason why URLs need ever be uploaded.

0) [https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/massive-blow-
to-...](https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/massive-blow-to-criminal-
dark-web-activities-after-globally-coordinated-operation)

------
rasz
100% of my searches produced no visible(to google) clicks for over 10 years.

    
    
       var resultLinks = e ? e.querySelectorAll('.r') : document.querySelectorAll('div#search .r');
       for (var i = 0; i < resultLinks.length; i++) {
        var link = resultLinks[i].childNodes[0];
        var oldLink = link.href;
        if (/^(https?:\/\/(www\.|encrypted\.)?google\.[^\/]*)?\/?url/.test(oldLink)) {
          var matches = /[\?&](url|q)=(.+?)&/.exec(oldLink);
          if (matches != null) {
            link.href = unescape(matches[2]);
          }
        }
        // Clear attached event listeners so google can't mangle urls on mouse click
        if (link.getAttribute('onmousedown')) {
          link.removeAttribute('onmousedown');
        }
        if (link.ping) link.ping = null;

------
JoshMnem
With AMP, signed HTTP exchanges, and "portals" it's getting even worse. Users
never leave their servers, and they control the publishing format and require
you to include their JavaScript. (It's only briefly mentioned in the article.)

------
noonespecial
There are plenty of types searches where I'm now viscerally afraid to click on
the results lest it result in a clusterbomb of pages I can't close without
multiple dialog boxes shooting out all over. Ublock helps but muscle memory is
long.

------
novaleaf
Funny, the article says a CTR of 4.42% is average. Yet my 5% CTR for my own
domain name, Google Adwords charges me upwards of $0.50/click, and says I'm
penalized (higher cost) because of low engagement.

This is for keywords with no competition, which makes me a bit bitter because
I have a substantial negative ROI. I can understand that Google wants to
prevent arbitrage spam, but I just last week decided to cut my adwords spend
to almost nothing because it's not getting better over time.

------
Invictus0
Do queries to voice assistants count as zero click searches?

------
buboard
Just remove your microdata and other site-specific metadata. HTML was fine to
begin with, its not our problem if facebook or google can't read a <meta
description> tag properly. Everyone forgives the transgressions that google
does because "it's Google", but when Elsevier does the same thing
(appropriating and locking other people's IP for huge profits), they 're
starting riots.

~~~
ska
> but when Elsevier does the same thing [... ]they 're starting riots

To be fair, that's a slow burn. Academics have been talking about this for
decades now.

~~~
Nasrudith
Not to mention the issues are apples and oranges - Elsevier is acting as a
gatekeeper for public research. Google is at worst exploiting fair use at
scale.

------
andrerm
And with AMP, Google is trying to do the same with entire sites.

In the long run why will we continue to produce content for Google?

Google must stop trying to suck the hole world into itself. Google is becoming
a big black hole.

And the "it is good for consumers" or "users like it" are just offensive. It's
good for Google. It may be good for users today but it's bad for content
producers and in the long run it's bad for everyone.

------
cromwellian
The dream of AI is to build a StarTrek like computer that can read and
understand all human knowledge and answer questions about it, synthesizing
answers.

Web Search for factual answers is a stop gap on that road, but distributed
knowledge databases are inexorably going to be centralized, melded, and
transformed.

The 90s “content is king” business models just aren’t sustainable if what
you’re publishing is static mostly factual content.

------
lordgrenville
Any DDG users notice how it does the same thing with the top StackOverflow
answer? From the user's perspective it's fantastic, but I assume it's legally
at least a grey area. Considering how aggressively SO is monetising now
they'll probably come after them before long. (Of course, DDG's userbase is
pretty small, but probably a not insignificant share of developers.)

------
rcarmo
I’ve mostly stopped using Google search due to the amount of
sponsored/summarized content on the first page, which either renders my search
useless (too many references to generic pieces or reviews rather than actual
product pages) or abridged snippets from web sites (that often carry just
enough information to be misleading).

I use DuckDuckGo, obviously, especially if I need technical information.

------
persistent
Google many years ago made an explicit decision that their mission is to
inform people, not just drive them away to terrible 3rd party sites.

------
mikekchar
I admit to using google as a spell checker. That is to say that my browser
spell checks but doesn't give me suggestions on how to fix it. I would say at
least 2/3 of my "searches" are really just spell checking (or small
calculations). I guess that's why I get such weird ads :-D

------
nitrogen
In some cases could this be because fewer than half of searches are returning
relevant results? For my part I've been having a really difficult time finding
things in Google lately. Even with search personalization on, results are
just.. completely off the mark.

------
MattyRad
As a reminder, DuckDuckGo (while being an alternative itself) supports bang
operators ([https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)), which
helps to prevent Google assimilation.

------
weinzierl
What does "Zero-Click Searches" mean exactly? I know that when I search for "1
pound in eur" Google will tell me the answer right away, but these kind of
searches can't possible account for 50%. What else am I missing?

~~~
johnward
One example is "how to tie shoes". It scrapes the content from wikihow and
displays it to you. There is no need to click through to the site to see the
content. Something similar happens for recipe searches.

------
trophycase
I do this all the time. What year did this album come out? Search the name of
the album and the year comes up in the sidebar. How old is this celebrity?
Search the name of that celebrity and their age comes up in the snippet on the
side.

------
new_here
Google benefits by crawling the content everyone else creates and by being the
aggregator for consumers. So it’s unfair to use other people’s content for
rich snippets and not reciprocate by referring traffic.

------
jammygit
I want to take the opportunity to blame SEO for this. The top results are
games so hard that not-rarely the first page is nothing but spammy seo sites
now. Depends a lot on what you are searching for though.

------
celebnetworth
This is Brian from the website celebritynetworth.com. I submitted the
following statement to the House subcommittee on Antitrust detailing the
history of Google scraping our information. The TL:DR is that Google
approached us about getting an API to our data. We said no. Google scraped the
whole site anyways. Google frequently displays our information directly in its
results without any attribution in a large snippet that takes up the entire
screen. The answer box is so large and dominating of the SERP that users have
no ABILITY to click through. Let alone need. Google's actions have absolutely
decimated our business. Here's our statement with image examples dating back
to 2012: [https://medium.com/@brianwarner/celebritynetworths-
statement...](https://medium.com/@brianwarner/celebritynetworths-statement-
submitted-to-the-house-subcommittee-on-antitrust-788fff88723f)

------
dpcan
Is this data from browsers infected with Malware like my Mother-and-Father-in-
Law's computer where all they do is search "the Google" for recipes or whether
a celebrity is dead?

------
provolone
Stop writing naive content in meta-description and cards. Use this content as
a teaser. Be cynical. Sell your content. Survive.

I read this as 50% of web developers failed to open, so they'll never close.

------
AtlasBarfed
Paid Ad Paid Ad Paid Ad Paid Ad Paid Ad SEO optimized not what I need SEO
optimized not what I need SEO optimized not what I need Kinda maybe what I
need? <next page>

------
frogpelt
My M.O. when I do a Google Search:

1\. Type some search terms.

2\. Look at the first page of results.

3\. Fail to find any results that look promising.

4\. Repeat.

Surely, this accounts for a large chunk of non-click searches?

------
canadianwriter
When Rand last posted about this it inspired me to look into other channels
such as email and social. Basically clicks are disappearing for ALL channels,
this isn't just a Google thing, it's a digital marketing thing as a whole. My
thoughts here: [https://kolemcrae.com/no-more-clicks-makes-me-
sad/](https://kolemcrae.com/no-more-clicks-makes-me-sad/)

------
onetimemanytime
since the 2008 recession Google has tried to avoid sending people to sites,
preferring ads and Google sites instead. Each year /update they have tightened
the screws. No doubt Google execs are saying, look we still send about 50% of
people to other sites, there's a lot more growth opportunity.

------
rogerkirkness
Sidebar: this suggests that ads may be a bit more useful than one would think,
in the CPC model.

------
carlmr
I like how the HN title corrects the grammar mistake in the original title
(less -> fewer).

------
badrabbit
Maybe a meta tag in html that tells bots to avoid scraping content would help
with this?

------
LocalTrust
Google Maps is vastly underutilized for search was the most valuable takeaway
for me.

------
beat
Also, fewer than half of all HN article link headlines result in a click.

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
It would be great to see a taxonomy of the zero-click searches.

------
t0ughcritic
Aren’t google searches just ads anyway?

------
k_bx
It was me using it as a calculator.

------
skybrian
Maybe compare this with only reading the headline on Hacker News?

We often prefer non-clickbait headlines for good reason. The answer to a
question may be simple enough to fit into the headline, but the site will
withhold it to get a click.

Paywalls also encourage people to skip reading the article. I find I'm a bit
annoyed at first, but it fades quickly and I realize the news probably isn't
that important anyway.

~~~
pwython
But Hacker News comments are the best part. The top comment always disagrees
with the headline/article. :)

------
woranl
The title "Less than half..." is pretty meaningless. 0% is less than half, so
is 49%.

~~~
tbirrell
No it isn't. It tells us that more than half of searches are 0-click. It may
not be _exact_ but it is meaningful.

------
djabatt
This is bad news.

------
rolltiide
WAAAY more than half of my google searches show the answer at the top.

Spelling

Definitions

Translations

Exchange Rates

Movie/TV/Video Game aggregate ratings

Zip Code for an address

and more

------
fromthestart
I didn't see it defined on the page, so I'm wondering, do zero click searches
count frustrated users giving up because the first two pages are entirely full
of SEO optimized commercial websites when searches are made for informational
content?

Try searching anything related to researching foundation repair. You get pages
upon pages of foundation repair services and biased one pager summaries about
certain procedures.

Long gone are the days when search queries retrieved educational content -
when was the last time you saw results for engineering toolbox, or
hyperphysics, or anything other than ads, commercial services, and stack
overflow for software related questions?

SEO killed search and Google is complicit. I think this has massive
ramifications for society - the sources of information are shallower, and
people are increasingly unable to notice differentiate objective knowledge
sources from commercial websites. The people who are interested in generating
and curating true knowledge repositories are probably not interested in paying
for SEO, so their efforts are effectively hidden from what amounts to _the_
gateway to the internet.

------
twirlock
Google doesn't search for what you ask anymore. It tells you what to search
for based on a prompt. Alphabet is the most oppressive entity in the history
of the known universe.

------
mruts
I guess this isn’t related, but am I the only one who feels like Google search
results are going down hill. Maybe 5 years ago I could find a lot of
information from small and big sites. Nowadays, it feels like half the Google
is just literally ignoring some of my search terms. And the other half they
are explicitly ignoring them by crossing out words because they assume I
search the same things as everyone else?

I dunno, maybe my queries are getting more complex? But I’m getting a strong
feeling that Google is becoming less and less useful as an indexer if the web.

------
not_a_cop75
This sounds a lot like "click fraud" only this time "search fraud".

------
pushingice
They're obviously wrong, right there in the headline. _Fewer_ than half of
Google searches now result in a click.

~~~
nerdponx
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_versus_less](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_versus_less)

------
netwanderer3
Ok so Google is a monopoly in this sector that's pretty clear, but what's the
real problem here? Their competitors offer inferior products so we don't
really have a case. Until they can develop better technology or offer superior
products than Google's and still are unable to gain market shares then that's
when we will have a real case.

Besides, for any business to continue leading long-term in modern days it's
inevitable it must seek to become a monopoly, or at least part of a duopoly.

