
Google Search is only 18% Search - jitbit
http://blog.jitbit.com/2012/09/googles-serp-is-only-25-serp.html
======
Matt_Cutts
So the major issues I saw with this article were:

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.

~~~
BCM43
Perhaps a better word for it would be results. I think it is valid to point
out what percentage of the page is results, because really that's what you are
looking at.

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?

~~~
Matt_Cutts
But the blog post headline is "Google Search is only 18% Search," and that's
just not correct. I look at the result count to estimate whether I'm into the
long tail of results, and I use the left-hand bar a bunch to refine searches
based on time. That's all search and it goes toward making the search
experience better for power users.

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/...](http://telephones.att.com/att/index.cfm/cordless-
telephones/all/) 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.

~~~
Mythbusters
Percentage aside, I think it is perfectly reasonable that Google reserves a
lot of space for ads. What pays for the search results after all? I am
surprised that people expect to get great service for free. It's just not
sustainable.

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.

~~~
rrreese
>What is not reasonable is how deceptively similar the ad looks to an actual
search result.

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.

~~~
aaronwall
Those of us who are in marketing, publishing, & start ups are not generally an
accurate reflection of the general market. We tend to be far more aware of
advertising than a typical web user.

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!"

------
calbear81
"Only 18.5% of the screen is devoted to something that people are actually
looking for."

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.

~~~
coliveira
People don't go to a search engine to look at ads, despite of what Google may
say. Most everyone knows that half of these ads are scams, and the other half
is of dubious precedence. People visit a search engine because they want to
see organic results. For example, most people, as soon as they have enough
technical ability, choose to install ad blockers to avoid losing their time
with Google ads.

~~~
bad_user
I do not install ad-blockers. Tried out Ad-Block Plus, but disabled it after a
week. Your claim about "most people" installing ad-blockers as soon as they
can is completely unsubstantiated.

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.

~~~
wazoox
> _If you don't like the ads served, just don't freaking use the
> service/website in question._

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?

~~~
bad_user
I also hate ads on TV. That's why I don't watch TV anymore. Except for HBO
which is not ad-supported.

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
    

That's true, but look at the other side of the coin as well ... because of
software piracy, alternatives don't have a chance to penetrate a market that's
monopolized. It also keeps Microsoft and Adobe lazy. No competition means no
incentive to improve and no incentive to lower the prices.

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).

~~~
wazoox
Notice that I don't like software piracy either, and I don't pirate myself: I
use almosts exclusively free software (yes, I'm one of these guys :) and I buy
my music, movies and the very few proprietary programs I use (like some
games).

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.

~~~
bad_user
Yeah, I agree, piracy is not theft, but new business models are needed.

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.

------
WestCoastJustin
I've been using Adblock+ for the last 6+ years. Granted the 13.8m users [1]
are a drop in the bucket compared to googles non Adblock+ viewers. I was a
little shocked to see this post as it is much different than what I see.

For the search "saas help desk"
([https://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=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...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Vq-
qWuUPZE/UER9ChRkKQI/AAAAAAAAAdU/KAojWeHbhpc/s400/serp2.gif)

[1] <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/>

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
They are being good guys about it; they could easily block all "Ad-Blockers"
and ask you to disable the adblocker to continue (as some sites already do).

~~~
jlarocco
Actually, there's no way to really block ad-block.

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.

~~~
Myrth
Seriously?

    
    
      function verifyAds() {
        if (!adContentsVisible()) {
          loadAdContents();
        }
        setTimeout(verifyAds, 1000);    
      }
      verifyAds();

~~~
codeka
Huh? Extension can override JavaScript on the page, too, you know:

window.adContentsVisible = function () { return true; }

~~~
Myrth

      (function() {  
        // local scope, can't override
      })();
    

My point is that I agree with grandparent, that they just allow ads to be
shown, and it's not technically impossible to reload ads, or prevent page
contents view, if no ads visible.

~~~
oinksoft
The plugin can absolutely mock the ad element(s) and make them seem to be
visible.

------
sologoub
In the image where you show the 18.5% organic footprint vs 81.5% ad footprint,
you are lumping in a lot of page real estate used for navigation and search
tools. The entire left hand side is not add related.

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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
He didn't go to Google looking for navigation, he went looking for the results
of his search.

So the way he discusses the real estate devoted to fulfilling his purpose is
quite reasonable.

~~~
jonknee
Except you use the navigation to improve your search. No one wants a page
completely full of organic results.

~~~
qu4z-2
I do.

Well, except perhaps my query at the top so I can refine it if necessary.

~~~
calciphus
So turn on adblock or get one of the scripts that strips down the UI.
Mountains of testing have shown that you're in the severe minority here.

~~~
qu4z-2
I do use scripts for that. I was just providing a counter point to the
parent's "No one wants". "Most people don't want" would be more accurate.

------
kevinburke
This observation made the rounds at Google a few months ago. Note also it
depends on the topic of your search. 3 ads in the yellow box are reserved for
highly monetized queries - "flowers" or "car insurance" for example.

Queries about programming topics - "sinatra post parameters" is one I tried a
few minutes ago - usually don't have ads.

~~~
barista
are the "highly monetized queries" queries also the most common queries?

~~~
sharkweek
They can be -- but not necessarily. It has a lot to do with conversions.
Someone searching "car insurance" or "cheap flights" is most likely on the
hunt for something they are willing to pay for; while someone searching
"football scores" is most likely just looking for free information.

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"

~~~
kevinburke
Ads are actually more likely to provide the answer to your question, or the
solution to your task, when you're searching for something to buy. Which may
weigh into why Google puts so many of them on the page.

~~~
vidarh
It's one of the things that prevents me from ad-blocking sites like Google.
Some of the time I will actively be searching _for_ the ads, and avoid the
natural results, because the natural results for some product searches can be
extremely spammy with "review" sites and comparison shopping sites with
horrible user experiences dominating the results, while the paid results are
usually decent retailers or distributors.

------
stcredzero
_> Is Google becoming a Yahoo?_

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?

~~~
tedunangst
The failure of A/B testing. More ads => more revenue. People won't abandon the
site immediately just because a new ad or two showed up, like a slow boiling
pot, so short term effects are always positive.

~~~
asr
Just like the sesame-seed hamburger bun:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/09/11.html>

(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.)

------
fear91
Some results are even worse. There were keywords where you could see only 7
organic results.

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.

~~~
fpgeek
> 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?

------
brownbat
The percentage of space occupied by ads varies depending on the search.

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.

------
polyfractal
Not to be a shill for Duck Duck Go, but the amount of search information
displayed is refreshingly dense:

<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=saas+help+desk>

<https://duckduckgo.com/?q=travel>

~~~
lawdawg
<http://www.google.com/search?q=saas+help+desk>

How is DDG any better really?

~~~
polyfractal
I'm not bombarded by fifteen different ads, who are all trying to pretend like
search results?

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.

~~~
enneff
The ads on the Google result page are probably better links than most of the
organic results. People who pay for traffic usually make the payoff
worthwhile.

~~~
korr
Nonsense. All three ads on the Google page are to thin domains with little
more than a contact form to harvest your info and spam you to death.

------
seanconaty
To be fair you should factor whitespace out when you're calculating the area.

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).

~~~
jitbit
I honestly thought about cutting all the white space completely, but then
after having a chat with our designer... He said that every page is visually
divided into blocks (even if there are no explicit visual borders of these
blocks), subjectively, of course. This, the "F-pattern" and "left-to-right"
orientation for the most of us brought us to an agreement that the last screen
was ok... The subjective "blocks" are somewhat like this.

But I agree, I shouldve been more precise

~~~
seanconaty
That makes some sense; sort of defining what the whitespace is "devoted" to.

------
slaven
Aaron Wall has documented the decline of organic search very well over the
years. Worth checking out: <http://www.seobook.com/the-sales-engine>

------
mmackh
I've had trouble staying focused when using Google a while back and decided to
write a Chrome extension for improving the Google Search experience. Here's
the URL for those interested:
<http://restfulpanda.com/post/25658805059/cleaning-google>

EDIT:

Turns this: <http://f.cl.ly/items/2y1F0d2d0a2K3L1n0Q2m/1.png>

Into this: <http://f.cl.ly/items/2P3B2c0X0V0Q3U0h3e3A/2.png>

~~~
mistercow
A big improvement, but as with ad blockers, you still have search results
crammed into a fairly narrow box. Obviously, you won't be able to get Google
to show longer titles and descriptions, but you should be able to widen the
box so that the two-line descriptions end up on one line, which would fit more
results on each page.

------
hsiaobrandon
Arguably, from a design perspective, a wider column of text is harder to read
than a narrower column of text. I personally find Google to be more legible
than it was before at 53% result space. That's just me, though.

~~~
joestringer
I'm not sure it is just you. Shorter columns are easier to read, which means
it serves users even better; our eyes don't have to track a massive row of
characters to see what the search result is.

------
typpo
Is that actually so different from the way things used to be? If you run the
example 2008 query, "open source social networking," the number of ads hasn't
changed.

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).

------
polshaw
Ironically (or not) jitbit.com is a similar percentage of content above the
fold, with almost identical content width.

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.

------
meritt
Can we please change the headline to something a bit less invalid and full of
sensationalism? This is a perfect example of distorting statistics to serve
ones purpose.

* 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>

~~~
Wilya
> * Author has a small screen.

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.

~~~
meritt
1280x960 is not a "big screen" by any modern definition.

------
Steko
Two minor nits about Google search:

(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.

~~~
fpgeek
Yeah, I can never remember which "News" keeps my current search and which
doesn't.

------
azakai
Related, I noticed a few days ago that google.com, which was once the most
minimalistic page possible, was cluttered by (1) an ad for chrome on top, and
(2) an ad for the Google tablet on the bottom. It felt messy.

Times have definitely changed.

------
srj
I believe the number of ads displayed varies based on the perceived usefulness
of the ads in answering the user's query. The ad space above the organic
search results shouldn't be lost space.

Note: I work at Google but not on web search, ads, or UI design. This is just
based on my personal observations.

------
ekianjo
If you scroll down the percentage of the search results significantly
increases :) I found this article quite dumb, honestly. If you make stats,
make it on the whole experience, not just the first seconds using Google...

------
damian2000
I was reminded today of the kind of tricky things google gets up to when I
went to the download page for "Win32 Disk Imager" on Softpedia (as linked to
by the Raspberry Pi's Download page).

[http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-
Burnin...](http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-
Burning/Win32-Disk-Imager.shtml)

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.

~~~
nostrademons
It is against policy:

[http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...](http://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1346295#Encouraging_accidental_clicks)

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.

------
jiggy2011
Question for people more familiar with google ads that me:

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?

~~~
tiziano88
By definition if no one has bid on the keyword, you can easily win the auction
by bidding the minimum amount. It is likely that the terms you were searching
for are not ideal targets for effective ads. Can you give an example of such
query?

~~~
jiggy2011
I can't remember which terms I searched when I discovered this, but I tried it
just now.

"computer networking" yields 1 ad. "networking" yields no ads.

------
aidenn0
It seems to me that linear vertical space matters more than area. It still is
small, but not as small. Showing ranked search results in multiple columns
makes no sense, and screens have gone from 4:3 to 16:9,, so you would expect
the extra area to be used for something other than search results.

~~~
xfs
When you have enough vertical space, Google will screw your results with
botched site crowding. See [http://www.seroundtable.com/google-same-result-
same-page-152...](http://www.seroundtable.com/google-same-result-same-
page-15287.html)

I've had worse, because I wanted to have 100 results in a page.

------
mbarbir
Google would apply a Panda-induced penalty to any website that followed a
similar content strategy.

[http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-
now-...](http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-
penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613)

It's good to be the king.

------
hcarvalhoalves
The author is only analyzing content above the fold. There's no conclusion to
draw from this, other than that Google used to cram more content above the
fold, like all other sites.

------
perfunctory
bing seems to be doing better in this regard.

~~~
barista
ok granted it is doing better by allocating more space to the search results.
But how about the search result quality? How's it doing there?

------
jordaninternets
I can't believe Google removed the ability to scroll down.

------
cin_
I almost pathologically click on the ads. If I hold down CTRL and click I am
giving back more than is enough to receive such an amazing, life changing?,
history changing?, service. Here's that click.

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.

------
davvid
Maybe it's just me, but all that wasted empty whitespace bothers me. I think
it may have gotten worse when google did their big UI overhaul.

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.

------
drcube
Use Adblock Plus. Problem solved. Google SERP is 100% relevant for me. It's
just results, white space and a little bit of UI.

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....

------
mistercow
At first I thought "well, if you're using an ad blocker, it's different", but
in Google's case, you just end up with white space instead of ads because the
search results are still crammed into a 42em wide box. I wonder if there's a
user script or chrome plugin to fix that.

------
state
This seems to me to be a similar kind of evaluation that Google would do on
its own work. Nice angle.

------
ashutoshrai
Considering the present standards of organic ranking an aware user(searcher)
will look for natural results more, than paid ones. So it is better to let
organic results take more space on Google search pages than inorganic ads.

------
msg
What I use:

GoogleMonkeyR - a Greasemonkey that breaks SERP ads and instant search and
allows you to format them to your liking.

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9310>

------
mijail
I think a big difference also is that Google's landing is clean, this is the
results page. Yahoo's landing page is cluttered but their results page I would
say is comparable.

Could somebody do this for other sites?

------
AznHisoka
This is something Aaron Wall has been trying to expose for the past 3-4 years
over at SEOBook.com (why oh why are these SO few comments compared to SEOMoz
everytime I visit there? this guy is NEVER afraid to speak the truth), and
it's just 1 of many disturbing trends happening. Google's mission is simple:
they want you to rely less on organic search and more on Adwords for your
traffic.

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.

~~~
TomGullen
> Plus it's hard to even correlated your SEO efforts with rankings because
> Google does stuff like drop your rankings randomly

And therefore they would have to increase your rankings randomly as well?

------
sravfeyn
I always forget that Google does ads on search page, after I installed the
amazing AdBlock extension on Chrome.

I don't see Google, Facebook Ads and many more, AdBlock knows what.

------
option_greek
I had to disable ad block to see the same screen and wow what a difference. No
wonder Google still looks clean to me - I'm not even seeing their ads.

------
ck2
There was also a big change in May 2010

<http://i.imgur.com/43a23.png>

2011 / May2010 / pre-May2010

(thumbnails are from searchpreview extension)

------
cryptoz
The search in our isn't considered 'search'?!

------
bobbybob
google have ads above fold, but matt cutts not tell us anything about it. And
how it improving user experience. Google now cares only about adwords money,
not about quality of their main product - organic search results. All that
stories about best possibly user experience it just tries to hide that fact.

------
redorb
my version from about a year ago
[https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-CZONTO-54lo/Tno6O3aK56I/A...](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-CZONTO-54lo/Tno6O3aK56I/AAAAAAAAAFc/pRhc_fM6big/s1267/scumbag_google.jpg)

~~~
lawdawg
For a query like "credit card", those non-organic results seem much more, if
not just as, relevant than the organic results. Why do people assume that if
it's an ad that it must be non-relevant? Advertisers wouldn't be advertising
on these keywords unless they were converting a good percentage of users ...
that means a good percentage of users are finding those links relevant.

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 ...

~~~
onetimeuse001
_"For a query like "credit card", those non-organic results seem much more, if
not just as, relevant than the organic results"_

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.

------
K2h
to me this is like tv shows. it use to be about 50 min of show, 10 min of
commercials

now its about 42 min show, 18 min commercials

------
logical42
maybe google is just 82% advertising.

~~~
bhartzer
Actually, doesn't the amount of advertising change based on the actual query
used?

~~~
logical42
that's actually a really interesting point and something which i had never
really considered. googling 'computational linguistics' (for me anyhow)
renders exactly zero ads, while googling 'computers' gives me almost an entire
screenful.

------
Karn
This shouldn't be an issue to programmers. With Greasemonkey or Scriptish it's
trivial to write a script to clean up the page so that you only see the
results.

