
How Google is Killing Organic Search - akharris
http://blog.tutorspree.com/post/54349646327/death-of-organic-search
======
jcampbell1
The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional
categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you
have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest
margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high
margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients).

Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you to Geico
or a bunch of lead-gen sites, and no matter what, you will end up at an
insurance company that makes the biggest margins.

If you really want the cheapest car insurance, you need to find a company that
doesn't advertise, and is non-profit, that way your premium is spent buying
insurance, not TV ads and Berkshire Hathaway's stock appreciation.

Whenever I see a SERP full of ads, I search for something different. When
there is nothing but ads, Google is sending you to high-margin crap.

~~~
nowarninglabel
I think your hypothesis is quite far off. Can you give an example of an auto
insurance company that is a non-profit? I couldn't find any. Perhaps you mean
a mutual insurance company? Furthermore, when I bought car insurance last
month, Geico gave me the most coverage for the least amount of money (after
quite a bit of research), so I also don't agree with your assertation that
Google is no help in that regard.

While I agree with the concept, as I work for a non-profit and belong to a
credit union instead of a bank, I don't think your hypothesis holds without
some data to back it up.

~~~
michaelhoffman
USAA
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAA#Returning_profits_to_the_i...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAA#Returning_profits_to_the_insured)),
although most people aren't eligible
([https://www.usaa.com/inet/pages/pub_eligibility_task_entry](https://www.usaa.com/inet/pages/pub_eligibility_task_entry)).

~~~
ActVen
This is hands down the best company with which I have ever done business.
Their technology is amazingly far ahead of others in the banking and insurance
space. I was taking a photo of a check with my smartphone to deposit it years
before it became mainstream.

It is a great example of how constraints build value. By constraints I mean,
they have had to deal with military customers stationed in far flung places
for years. This built their capability to conduct business virtually.

~~~
thecoffman
I will second pretty much everything you just said. I have renter's and auto
insurance, checking, savings and a credit card all through USAA and they are
fantastic. Many banks are just beginning to catch up with their technology and
none can match their customer service.

------
saalweachter
Nit: this article is really criticizing a UI change which makes local results
more prominent (in that they take over the entire page). The local results at
the top of the page when you search for "Italian restaurants" are all still
organic. In fact, whenever there's a map on the right-and side of the page,
it's _displacing_ ads.

Now, you can be against Google ever making a UI change, or even against Google
showing different results for "Italian restaurants" in New York and Chicago,
but this doesn't really have anything to do with "organic" search results.

~~~
akharris
The issue there is that the "organic" results you're talking about that show
in either the map or the carousel aren't organic at all - they're google local
listings. As a restaurant, you are now incentivized to a) buy ads to get
traffic from the ad units b) give google data (effectively building a whole
other website) through google+/local.

You are very much being de-incentivized from investing in a page that is
outside of google's universe, because you're only shot there is pure organic,
which matters less and less.

~~~
3825
I find this interesting. I didn't think of Google local listing as not organic
but I did the search in the article[1] and sure enough it takes a lot of the
real estate. Perhaps, Google could publish a standard way to write your own
self-hosted _Places_ page? We will still have questions on how the ranking
will work and whether Google will prioritize its own Google+ place pages over
self-hosted place pages but I think this would be a start. What do you think?

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/Bf74Dd7.png](http://i.imgur.com/Bf74Dd7.png)

~~~
leoc
Well, thereby hangs a tale. But the short answer is that, by and large, Google
seems to be aggressively uninterested in scraping that kind of
structured/semantic data from the public Web. In fact it even seems to have
been active in trying to prevent that kind of data from finding its way into
webpages at all: remember the arcane but nasty scrap about metadata in HTML5?
Well, _this_ is what that was all about.

~~~
Shooti
Scraping/doing it semantically has copyright implications (Re: Europe) so
realistically the Google-owned approach is the most viable one.

~~~
3825
Does Europe think that the robots.txt approach is cumbersome for "content"
owners? If someone doesn't want anyone to crawl, they'd put something like

User-agent: * Disallow: /

------
ChuckMcM
This is true of course, Google doesn't make any money on organic search,
nobody does, so it gets the short shrift.

At Blekko we built a search engine (crawler, extractor, ranker, fetcher, the
whole stack) and let people know exactly how we rank things, for users who
created an account and logged in they could turn off everything except organic
results. We have been moderately successful (we were the first to use a
'masked results' option [1] to show how much better our results were than
Google's in contested searches) but there isn't enough outrage about that yet
to build a business yet.

Most of our business (people who pay us money) comes from folks who either
want to figure out how to game Google's results, or want some organic results
to create a 'search like experience' much as Google does. When you think about
it with only 7% of the page dedicated to organic results that is like 2 or
maybe 3 actual search results and the rest of the page is a carefully crafted
advertising vehicle. Sort of like a free 'newspaper' which has one article of
editorial content and the rest are all ads. You can serve that market quite
effectively with a relatively small index (a couple of billion URLs).

If you look at Google's financial performance over the years you can see how
this evolution has affected their bottom line. Today you see it in declining
revenue per click sorts of things. It feels to me as it did when banner ads
went from this massive cash cow into something less useful.

One thing is true though, the world is changing yet again.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-
blekkos-3-en...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-
blekkos-3-engine-monte/)

~~~
crockstar
Hi Chuck,

I'm glad that folks like Blekko are trying to improve the search landscape but
do you have any figures to back up the declining revenue per click?

I feel as though Google are becoming more and more focussed on profits
(evidenced by their (not provided) data hypocrisy, role out of "enhanced
campaigns, etc.) but their profits seem to grow[1] and they seem to focus on
margins over advertiser or user experience with increasing focus.

I'm glad that folks like yourselves are in the market as I say but until
someone develops better algos and better results (for the majority of queries)
it's unlikely that folks will get angry enough to move or see a viable
alternative.

In spite of these changes I haven't really seen a decline in Google's market
share[2] drop consistently or significantly so I don't really see a change
coming any time soon.

References: [1]
[http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2013/01/1-22-2...](http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2013/01/1-22-2013googleearnings.jpg)

[2] [http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2275863/Google-Bing-
Bot...](http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2275863/Google-Bing-Both-Win-
More-Search-Market-Share) (June, '13) "Google has the identical search share
of 66.7 percent when comparing May 2012 and May 2013."

vs.

[http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269591/Googles-
Search-...](http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2269591/Googles-Search-
Market-Share-Drops-as-Bing-Passes-17) (May, '13)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Read Google's financial releases if you want to see evidence of their
declining revenue per click, of follow the news [1][2][3]. Its a combination
of factors, the market is maturing, there aren't too many people left who _don
't_ advertise on the Internet, and other sources are getting more market share
(Bing, Facebook, Etc.)

    
    
      > I'm glad that folks like yourselves are in the 
      > market as I say but until someone develops better
      > algos and better results (for the majority of 
      > queries) it's unlikely that folks will get 
      > angry enough to move or see a viable alternative.
    

Actually one of the things Blekko has taught me is that search market share is
no longer about search quality. At Blekko we demonstrated that we could
provide better results in important queries and that how we did that would
scale as we got larger. But we didn't get a lot of traction. Microsoft however
(who we talked to) were so impressed that they essentially ripped off
everything we were doing and put Bing on that path.

Now on the one hand I should be outraged Microsoft ripped us off [4], but I'm
not. Its been interesting to see how much time and money they have spent
making our strategy into a 'full size' search engine, and realizing that we
were not going to be able to raise close to a billion dollars (which is what
they will have easily spent by now) to take it to market against Google. The
Bing challenge, the editors picks, the whole thing taken right from our
playbook. And while I believe they are having the best success they ever have
against Google to date (its a good strategy), there is another 3 years for it
to run before consumers think that they are equal services. And there is a
whole lot of dirty politics between here and there.

As for market share, its a curious thing. You can earn it or you can force it.
Look for more and more "search defense" going on, for example non-Google
searches getting harder on Android, or in Chrome. Conversely non-Microsoft
searches in Windows products. With people like Firefox getting played in the
middle (try to search on Google on Firefox on the standard Linux Mint
distribution for example :-) Gone are the days where simply having a better
product will let you win that prize. Way too much money involved.

[1] [http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/weak-ad-revenue-
pulls...](http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/weak-ad-revenue-pulls-google-
down)

[2] [http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/07/24/1553214/the-
decline-...](http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/07/24/1553214/the-decline-of-
googles-and-everybodys-ad-business)

[3] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/04/18/google-
tops...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/04/18/google-
tops-q1-profit-expectations-as-ad-price-declines-ease/)

[4] It would have been polite of them to have at least offered to buy us out
:-)

------
sologoub
Maybe this is a misconception on my part, but isn't local search listings and
map info a form of organic search, just derived using different signals for
authoritativeness and relevancy, of which proximity is only one variable?

If the above is true, Google is dedicating way more real estate to organic
than ever. It's just a different form of organic.

~~~
205guy
I came here to say the same thing. But one of the other comments [1] points
out how the "local" listings (Google-owned Zagat) or maps are actually
Google's curated business listings, not the business' website. Same goes for
Google shopping, Google books, etc, where in popular categories, Google slurps
up all the content.

On the one hand, that does level the playing field, because little guy doesn't
need huge website and SEO to compete against big guy. But fundamentally,
everyone is now handing over the control of their data to Google. Let's say
you change your business hours (and as a potential customer, I do love
Google's display of today's business hours) or phone number, how quickly does
Google update all that? Probably very quickly, but it's now out of your hands.

And as that comment points out, positioning within those "local" results may
be determined by ads (and they are not divided into paid and organic
sections)--but we don't always know. Google is definitely trying to blur the
line by moving away from the be basic search results listing.

I wanted to add that the problem of organic search results is always going to
exist for any sort of business (as in both examples of the original
article)--as opposed to information. Let's say I'm searching instead for a
performance of Beethoven's 9th. Hopefully, people around the internet are
linking to good performances, and Google will show me the "best" one. And it
will have ads for ringtones and buying CDs of Beethoven's 9th, which is to be
expected. But I can be fairly confident the organic part of the results are
meaningful. With local search or business search, there is no such thing--
Google is not indexing the real world, just what people put on the web. And
when there is money on the line, what people put on the web is designed to
make them money (SEO, ads, paid reviews, etc.).

[1] akharris:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972516)

~~~
Shooti
> Let's say you change your business hours (and as a potential customer, I do
> love Google's display of today's business hours) or phone number, how
> quickly does Google update all that? Probably very quickly, but it's now out
> of your hands.

On the contrary, its completely in your hands:
[http://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/](http://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/)

The point of contention is that its a Google controlled affair instead of
going through an external standard.

~~~
tripzilch
I know several small businesses (hairdressers etc) that have a wrong phone
number or other data in Google's "zero click" information. One even has the
number of _another_ hairdresser by the same name.

Now while it's nice that people can _in theory_ update their business
information using that site (that I myself had never heard of before either),
but the reality of the matter is that, even in the 21st century, the modal
local business owner just isn't very good with computers and the Internet.

The difference?

The website they get from some (probably also local) webdev company comes with
customer support. Google has none.

Wrong or outdated information? One phone-call with a human being and it's
fixed.

Try that with Google. They'll be talking to a robot and filling out form after
form after form, in no-time. Believe it or not, but "figuring out this Google
stuff" probably takes them at least a whole afternoon.

------
fastball
This is absurd.

First, the author factored the screen space taken up by the google search bar
into his calculations. Really? You want to press the back button each time you
want a new search? And don't get me started on the fact that the author
factored in the goddamn page margins as part of his percentage.

Secondly: the 7% of the page that is taken up by a map? Yeah, those are also
organic results. In fact, they are probably more helpful to most people than
the author's version of organic results (just links to websites).

Thirdly: after you scroll down (takes about 0.1 seconds) the percentages
change significantly, as the entire box of sponsored results is no longer
there.

So. If we eliminate the search bar and the margins, and we include the map in
our percentage, and we scroll down a tad so that the sponsored ads disappear,
you're looking at a page that is about 70% organic results.

FINALLY AND MOST IMPORTANTLY. Google did not become popular because it showed
the highest PERCENTAGE of organic search results per page. It won the search
wars because IT'S RESULTS ARE MORE RELEVANT THAN OTHER SEARCH ENGINES.
Percentages DO NOT affect the relevance of google's results. It's all about
relevance.

------
sethbannon
DuckDuckGo is far less cluttered, which makes sense considering they have less
things to push aside from the results:
[http://i.imgur.com/OnBJHkS.png](http://i.imgur.com/OnBJHkS.png)

~~~
GuiA
In light of "designy" things like this, and other "ideological" things that
have transpired in the past few weeks, I've been forcing myself to use
DuckDuckGo.

It's been about a month now, and I find the results _terrible_. I want to love
it, but the first 10 results are pretty much never what I want. Sadly, Google
still performs better on this front for me. If anyone has tips to make it
better, I'd be very happy to hear them.

~~~
api
I've found DDG to be better at finding obscure content, and the Goog to be
better at finding what I call "canonical" content.

For example, if I search for "binary tree" I probably want Wikipedia followed
maybe by StackExchange. Google does that, while DDG sends me deep into the
netherworld.

~~~
yaddayadda
One awesome thing about DDG is their !bang searches. It won't automate an
unknown search, but if you know the first thing you're going to want is the
Wikipedia entry you just search ["binary tree" !w]; for related StackExchange
questions ["binary tree" !so]; you can even do a straight goggle search
["binary tree" !g]. For the available !bangs check out -
[https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html](https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html)

~~~
acdha
If I already know where I'm going, why involve a third-party?

~~~
yaddayadda
I have my Firefox url bar set to DDG, so it's way faster for me to:

1\. type ["binary tree" !w] in the url bar

than it is to:

1\. type [wikipedia] in the url bar (I don't even know if it's a com or org,
but DDG would be fine with just [wikipedia]. If I knew whether it was com or
org, then I could skip the next step.)

2\. click the wikipedia link in the now displayed DDG results

3\. find the field to enter the site-specific search terms (for many -- _but
not all_ \-- it's in the upper right corner)

4\. type ["binary tree"] in the site-specific search box

~~~
acdha
In Chrome, that's:

1\. Start to type wikipedia 2\. Hit tab as soon as wikipedia.org is the first
choice 3\. Start typing the query and note that the suggestions are coming
from Wikipedia, not google

Significantly faster than waiting several seconds for DDG to redirect

------
brudgers
I turned on my television and none of the programs were organic. Instead all
the content was controlled by my cable provider. I'm beginning to suspect that
they just put on those shows to make money off the advertising.

It's rather simple.

When you type terms into the search box, just imagine the words, "Please show
me advertisements for " in front of it.

~~~
apalmer
of course, but once you get to a point 50 minutes out of every hour is a
commercial, and only 10 minutes is an actual TV show... you start to see a
breakdown in the whole business model. Perhaps Google has reached the point
where they will soon start experiencing a breakdown that forces them to show
more 'content' and less 'ads'. However since the general public cant easily
tell what links are paid and what are true searches anymore (and perhaps they
dont really even care), maybe this business model will go on for a long time.

~~~
vacri
That has always puzzled me - why does pay TV have ads within the programs. I
can understand outside the programs to round out to half-hour slots, but
handing over money to get shows with ads inside them? I just don't understand
why people go for these things.

~~~
ufo
Cable TV didn't have that many ads when it started out. They increased the
amount as it became more stablished and more people started beeing invested in
it (at least thats the impression I get in my country).

------
andrewljohnson
I'm typically a Google fanboy, but spot on. Here's a search for sushi for me:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3epmld2ffqzg3f/Screen%20Shot%2020...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3epmld2ffqzg3f/Screen%20Shot%202013-07-01%20at%209.38.09%20AM.png)

It's like full circle back to Yahoo.

Maybe this is a result of listening to the data too much, and not depending on
the greater vision enough. Or maybe it's the future and you're gonna love it.

~~~
sanderjd
Maybe I'm the weirdo, but I think that's an extremely useful results page.
What are you looking for when you search for "sushi" besides (more likely)
nearby sushi restaurants or (less likely) information about what sushi is. The
screen real estate seems to reflect those two possibilities in what seems to
me to be a sensible proportion.

~~~
andrewljohnson
It used to be, when you clicked a link on Google, you left Google to go
elsewhere. Now, you search for something like sushi, then go to Google Maps,
then see the phone number, then call.

I'm not _necessarily_ saying this is bad or unwanted, but it's a vast
philosophical and product shift for Google. And it has implications for the
trustworthiness and long-term usefulness of Google.

I do not welcome a future where Google invalidates the business models of
businesses like Yelp by delivering their content in such a way that makes
going to Yelp unnecessary. I don't want all of my websites to be subsumed by a
corporate behemoth, so I get short term better products, but long term stifled
innovation.

~~~
jonknee
Or you can go to the restaurant's website through the link either on the SERP
or Maps page... 8/10 though I don't want to see what Wordpress template a
restaurant is using this week, I just want to know if it's open, what other
people think about it and how to get there.

I find this SERP to be vastly more useful than how it used to be. Restaurant
owners should too, I no longer will skip visiting your place because your
website sucks or is not mobile friendly.

~~~
tripzilch
> Or you can go to the restaurant's website through the link either on the
> SERP or Maps page...

There are no links to restaurant's websites on that SERP page. Except one link
to a Facebook page nearly falling off the bottom of screen.

If you click the photos or the red balloons on the map you won't go to the
restaurant's webpage, but to another page on Google that presumably has more
information. Sometimes the link to the restaurant's webpage isn't there either
and I have to use yet another query (name of restaurant + location) to find
the actual webpage.

The point/complaint of the article is that Google's results seems to be less
and less coming from the Web as their index and more and more from information
sources that Google controls.

Even though the change for the typical end-user might be small ("I can find
the same stuff"), if continued, it signals a huge change in what Google _is_.
It used to be a service to help you execute a text search over billions of
documents, which I still think is a very neat thing to be able to do.

~~~
calebegg
That's simply not true. When I click one of the carousel results, I get a
search result for the exact restaurant, with their page at the top:

Initial search: [http://files.calebegg.com/sushi-
search.png](http://files.calebegg.com/sushi-search.png)

After clicking an item: [http://files.calebegg.com/sushi-
result.png](http://files.calebegg.com/sushi-result.png)

At least use the damn feature before you join in bashing it.

------
wicknicks
I'm not convinced with the arguments in this post. Auto Mechanic and Italian
Food are both vague queries. Auto Mechanic could mean the definition of the
term or places around you or even . And its not super hard to get rid of
advertisements. If you really want better "organic" results, type in a better
query -- "Auto Mechanic, Bay Area" or "Italian Food, New York".

I think its almost taken for granted that all search is interactive. If the
first try is not precise, refine the query and try again. Its not correct to
compare the Google of today with the "organic" search engines of a decade ago.
The world, and the web have changed tremendously since. It can be argued that
Google is trying to help the consumer by showing multi-faceted search for
vague queries (which can potentially narrow search requirements) or provide
cues about forming the next query -- and if a company can make money doing
that, whats wrong in it?

------
thecosas
This is making the arguments based on only things "above the fold". There are
plenty of people that have dispelled the myth that content NEEDS to be above
the fold (1)(2).

That said, the implication with Google results is that the higher up on the
page the link is, the more relevant that link is to a user's search. In my
experience, very few people ever get to the second page of Google Search
results. I'm all but certain that if we looked at heatmaps of clicks across
all Google search pages, we would see this quite clearly. It's the entire
reason that SEO has been an industry at all.

It gets more troubling with products like Google Cars (3)(4). It is literally
another layer of PPC results specific to cars. I've got to think that other
car retailers (including manufacturers) can't be too happy about this.

(1) [http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/](http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/) (2)
[http://blog.kissmetrics.com/why-the-fold-is-a-
myth/](http://blog.kissmetrics.com/why-the-fold-is-a-myth/) (3)
[http://www.drivingsales.com/blogs/InvestigativeReporting/201...](http://www.drivingsales.com/blogs/InvestigativeReporting/2013/04/08/google-
cars-it-means-dealers-consumers-industry) (4)
[http://searchengineland.com/google-tests-new-car-leads-
produ...](http://searchengineland.com/google-tests-new-car-leads-
product-126070)

------
andrewjshults
The first result for mobile is organic as far as I can tell (it just happens
to be a google property when looking for Italian Restaurants in Tribeca). Try
switching the query for mexican restaurant and just a few blocks to the west
in SoHo (hi Aaron) a menupages result is first. Also, on the mobile front, I
believe the quick results are from places and not Zagat, since with the same
mexican restaurants query there are a number of places with just ratings and
not "Zagat" ratings (you can see this in the blog's screenshot for Olive
Garden as well).

I actually don't mind this on mobile (but I also generally use something else
for finding restaurants) since the majority of restaurant websites are
basically impossible to navigate on mobile and all I really need to know is 1)
where are they 2) what's their phone number. How organic that database is, I'm
not sure, but it doesn't seem to be showing specifically paid placements.

------
programminggeek
What you don't understand is Google's been doing this for almost a decade now.
It's about profit optimization while not pissing off your users, or sometimes
helping them even.

A paid result can be a useful thing and might even be better than an organic
result in many cases, but both have their pitfalls and it's not surprising for
them to keep going this route more and more.

Google is a company, not a nonprofit. They are in it for the money. Why is
anyone surprised?

~~~
notsosmart
Not surprised, but they have 65% share of search in the US, so it's a
disturbing trend for high quality sites ranking organically.

------
ChrisAntaki
There is a way to increase the percentage of organic search results on a
Google page, with relative ease. Just scroll down.

~~~
goostavos
I mean, really, what is the article complaining about here? The most often
clicked on organic search results appear above the fold. If you need more,
scroll down a bit.

Maybe I'm the minority, but if what I'm looking for isn't one of the first few
results, I modify my query. Google is showing the stuff that makes it money,
and the organic stuff we're most likely to need.

And at the end of the day, what we're talking about is having to scroll down
on a page. Faux blog outrage.

~~~
estel
Indeed, I wasn't really aware that the "fold" was really much of an issue any
more with modern web design. Users expect to, and do, scroll down; it's no big
deal :/

------
jmarbach
I agree with the arguments here on the whole. However, if you declare a local
search on your own, by simply including "italian restaurant in tribeca",
Google offers far more organic results.
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32342947/Screen%20Shot%2...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32342947/Screen%20Shot%202013-07-01%20at%201.02.46%20PM.png)

------
Eclyps
For some reason I was surprised to see bing's results even more cluttered and
useless... [http://i.imgur.com/kuRTMhO.png](http://i.imgur.com/kuRTMhO.png)

You would think that bing would be trying to win the popularity contest by
actually providing more relevant searches in the short term and then expanding
ads in the future...

~~~
estel
I'm not sure why Google's results might be said to be /useless/? There's
definitely an interesting argument to be made about Google using a
monopolistic position in search to cross-promote some of their other products
(local, ads, maps), but the OP's examples seem to show results that quite
likely exactly what the user would have been searching for.

I guess what I'm saying is that pure organic search isn't necessarily the
optimal way for a user to find the information they're looking for.

------
lmgftp
This article seems to make a point of showcasing Zagat's rating in search
above others, somehow indicating that Google is unfairly manipulating search
results to it's own gain (as Zagat is Google, Inc. owned).

However, there's an important point here to be made, which has been said in
numerous antitrust arguments against Google, and that is, "what if the product
in No. 1, Google's, is in fact preferred by consumers and therefore is, to use
language of the tutorspree authors 'organic'?".

It's an interesting question. I find much of the article interesting and of
course the screen space dedicated to search is a hot topic, and Google's
minimal style still remains in my favor, I just wanted to briefly object to
the claim that somehow showing a non-ad Zagat page is "0%" (in the author's
numbers) organic search.

------
chaz
Measuring the usefulness of a page by percentage of screen real estate only
seems useful if the user is looking or clicking randomly around the screen.
The structure, layout, and clarity of communication are far more important.

> 7% is all that’s left for the entrepreneurs and restaurantuers who believed
> Google over the years when they were told that good business with well
> structured pages would be able to get in front of potential customers
> searching the internet.

I'm really curious how the author would propose to fix this. Even with all of
the other stuff cut away, there are only still 10 blue links to give.

~~~
lazyjones
> Measuring the usefulness of a page by percentage of screen real estate only
> seems useful if the user is looking or clicking randomly around the screen.

You should tell Google that. They claim to be penalizing web sites with too
many ads "above the fold": [http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-
ad-heavy-pag...](http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-
pages-100601)

The bigotry in this has been pointed out by many people already ... Google is
basically forcing other sites to use less attractive advertising while
offering extremely annoying ads "above the fold" themselves, smells like
unfair competition to me.

~~~
brlewis
Try thinking about this from the user's perspective rather than the site
owner's perspective. How do you like it when you click on an ad that looks
like it has useful information behind it, and you come to a page that's mostly
ads?

~~~
lazyjones
> How do you like it when you click on an ad that looks like it has useful
> information behind it, and you come to a page that's mostly ads?

Was that a Freudian slip? If I click on an _ad_ that doesn't fulfill my
expectation, the advertiser failed and will feel it, the market fixes this in
the long run.

If I click on a search result (perhaps you meant that) and I get to see mostly
ads, I can a) install an ad blocker, b) go back and click on the next result,
c) ignore the ads or actually click on the ads. But there's nothing about this
that warrants special treatment for Google's pages, which are full of ads. If
Google thinks, users will not like pages full of ads, they should stop
cluttering their search results with them. If they don't, they're just giving
themselves an unfair advantage over the indexed pages.

------
VMG
The numbers are somewhat misleading: they don't add up to 100% because
whitespace is counted as well (although not displayed). I personally like the
whitespace on the results page.

Also the ads on the right side are delineated very liberally - one could argue
that the actual area is half as wide.

------
achille2
I see lots of comments bashing Google, ads are evil, all that. But honestly
how many people search for "italian food" on the web expecting global results
to be relevant locally? Google is providing exactly what people are looking
for when they google for Italian.

------
_jmar777
This feels somewhat disingenuous. Naturally a site making it's money off of
ads is going to give them an above-the-fold and prominent position. Just
scroll down... the value add is in the qualify of the organic results (which
is still there), not in the absence of scrolling.

If you think the ratio is off, then write an article about it... but this is
hardly "killing organic search".

~~~
WalterGR
_Naturally a site making it 's money off of ads is going to give them an
above-the-fold and prominent position. Just scroll down..._

Google penalizes sites with above-the-fold ads. It doesn't take much at all to
earn the penalty. I think that's one reason why people are miffed with
Google's excessive ATF advertising on their SERPs.

------
nostraspamus
To reduce the amount of useless clutter that Google displays in search
results, try verbatim mode.

You can turn on verbatim mode on the search results page. Click on the Search
Tools menu, then look in the All Results menu for the Verbatim option.

The verbatim option tells Google to use all your search terms, as-is, and (at
least at present) the search results are much less cluttered.

To always use verbatim mode, remove the search terms from the URL in the
address bar (leaving intact the other parameters that turn on verbatim mode)
and create a bookmark.

Don't tell Google about this feature... I depend on it!

------
philhippus
Let them greed themselves into irrelevance I say. That leaves the door open
for some YC startup to implement some type of peer to peer search protocol
that will leave google in the dust.

~~~
philippelh
It remembers me this [http://yacy.net/en/](http://yacy.net/en/)

------
hcarvalhoalves
To put it simply, if you're top 3 on organic results, Google is useless for
your business. And sometimes not even being top 3.

Nowadays you're supposed to buy ads to stay competitive. Google grew so much
that it's now a monopolist behemoth, and that's why they're swimming in money.
But because they keep all the nerds in love with them, they manage to get zero
flak for it.

------
ZanderEarth32
While this is true, users are still clicking organic results much more often
than the paid options even though the organic results real estate keeps
shrinking[1].

Even with the shrinking organic screen space, the first three results still
capture the vast majority of the clicks, so results 4-10 receive fewer clicks
regardless of the amount of space given to organic results.

I'd like to see a study where organic results 1-10 all appear on the page
above the fold, giving users the ability to see all the results without having
to scroll and measure click through rates at that time.

1\. [http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2200730/Organic-
vs.-Pai...](http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2200730/Organic-vs.-Paid-
Search-Results-Organic-Wins-94-of-Time)

------
davidedicillo
To be fair searching for "italian restaurants" in San Francisco the first
result returned is a Yelp link on mobile, so I guess that the Zagat one wasn't
a way to show necessarily a Google owned property. Everything else is the
same.

------
j45
Google is becoming like a newspaper. A connecting point between people, ideas
and information.

How:

1) Google has steadily moved away from optimally presenting search results
which they possess.

2) In being this connecting point, ads increasingly have taken over the space
where organic results are published, much like ad space is sold first in a
newspaper and articles are squeezed in around it.

Everything changes, or does it? Content is king, except finding content is a
new king.

3) Google generally has the content we seek - in the form of search results.
The results are squeezed around ads. This creates a cognitive cost to separate
ads from results, instead of just finding what we need, which was the original
promise of Google. This implies, at some point we're giving into reading the
ads like they were the results?

Users have only ever been interested in search results from a search engine,
not ads. In a way, good search results was a promise shared by AltaVista and
Google. Being able to easily access them is what is changing.

Last year I was irritated enough to build my own search interface, focused on
presenting results how I wanted to see them.

4) The cognitive cost had added up to be too much to scan Google constantly to
find the one weather, or movie link I have looked at for the last 10 years,
and becoming increasingly harder and harder to find.

My thoughts come back to the announced shuttering of AltaVista, in wondering
whether we really ended up ahead. Google certainly has done things no one else
has, getting search so good, and now finding what we want is a little more
work.

5) Google is a business, and need a financial engine. As much as advertising
currently seems to pay for the internet, I wonder if a day is coming where
we're more willing to put our money where our mouth is.

It may take some time, for the majority of internet users to have 10+ years of
online experience of doing the same searches and finding them harder to find.

What to do? I feel like brushing up my custom search interface and use it a
little more.

------
dennisgorelik
What kind of startup could exploit that situation with Google SERP?

My guess would be that some sort of rating site that better answers questions
like "what car to buy?" should benefit from Google removing organic results
from searches like that.

------
arbuge
The rub is that a paid result can be just as useful from the consumer
perspective as an organic result. If that's the case, Google will show the
paid result every time.

------
wyck
It gets even worse, on some searches I have to scroll a full page down, just
to see a result not pushed by a google asset (ads/map/etc). In essence it
takes up about 90% of screen space on a large desktop.

Example: [http://imgur.com/AJtOPkf](http://imgur.com/AJtOPkf) (this is zoomed
down to 65% to capture all of it....)

They need to remember that there are alternatives just a click away, and
serving too many ads degrades the entire internet.

------
mydpy
From a network centrality metrics perspective, is there such a thing as
"organic search"? Is the premise flawed or is the Page Rank metric considered
organic?

------
anizan
Before Google, people used to use Yahoo directory to find links.The only all
encompassing directory in competition now with Google search is Wikipedia (not
even its intended purpose)

People can use Yelp to find Italian restaurants in San Francisco but try
typing the same in Wikipedia.

Is there any personalized search engine which lets you choose
Yelp/Zagat/Tripadvisor when you type in that keyword? and maybe pull down
Google map so Google doesnt feel left out ;)

------
lazyjones
Do results from [https://startpage.com](https://startpage.com) work for people
in the US? I've been using it for a couple of weeks now (I'm in the EU) and it
seems like it works very well (it claims to get its results from Google, but
without affecting privacy). It shows some display ads, the percentage of
screen real estate used is much smaller than for Google itself.

------
zokier
I just tested this myself, and got 43.8% of organic results (I'm counting the
image result preview as organic results), 18.9% of google UI (the bars on
top), and 35,2% whitespace. They do not sum to 100% because I just roughly
measured stuff at photoshop. Zero ads or curated content on either search,
logged in with my personal google profile.

I guess adblock and not living in US has some advantages.

------
Afforess
I wonder if there is interest in someone building a search site that uses the
google custom search API to search. The CSE that Google provides does not
include advertising or local results unless specifically requested. The only
problem would be that it costs money for large volumes, so you might have to
charge or use ads to pay for it.

------
kenster07
I disagree with the premise. "Organic" search will not exist, barring a
radically new business model. Any search engine with the resources to produce
good search results must carry auction-based advertising in order to fund the
quality of their results.

Good luck finding that business model, and being able to reap the profits from
it.

------
sctt311
Great article! Sad in a way how Google continues to dominate and impose it's
will on us.

~~~
jordanthoms
Yeah, fancy showing relevant local results when you search for a Restaurant!
The bastards!

------
akos
Not a new thing: [http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10359-60-of-google-
visitors-...](http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10359-60-of-google-visitors-
need-to-scroll-to-see-high-value-natural-search-results)

------
znowi
Google Search was totally awesome when it first came out. Disrupted the whole
industry and set new standards of search on the web.

Now I find myself longing for a new company and a new disruption of what is
essentially Google monopoly.

------
benradler
Google == advertising company Google != search engine

------
wxspll
I'm happy with Google because no ads while using www.google.com ( not .hk ) in
Mainland China where Google quited from. Thanks Google! :)

------
pizu
And this is a further proof:
[https://www.google.co.uk/flights](https://www.google.co.uk/flights)

------
sengstrom
Those percentages don't add up to 100%. Seems disingenious to count the white
space in the display just to make a point.

------
limejuice
On desktop, set [http://duckduckgo.com](http://duckduckgo.com) as your search
provider. Problem Solved.

Even when I !g to see google results, I see 100% organic results because I
have Adblock Plus plugin installed on firefox. Problem Solved.

Make sure you have 'Hide placeholders of blocked elements' option enabled,
otherwise AdBlock will show a blank rectangle where the ads used to be.

~~~
vacri
You're not getting 100% organic results because the author is using screen
space as the measure, not returned results (and apparently a custom map
doesn't count as an 'organic result'). White space at the sides of ddg?
Doesn't count. ddg UI bar at the top? Doesn't count.

------
mattbarrie
Panda and Penguin are euphemisms for Google A/B testing revenue.

------
api
[http://www.duckduckgo.com/](http://www.duckduckgo.com/)

------
islon
You either die a hero or live long enough to became the villain. At least we
have duck duck go.

------
gojomo
Big dog's gotta eat.

------
gordaco
This is why I block ads.

------
teeboy
Adblock,FTW ! Never seen an ad in several years now.

------
marban
goto.com anyone?

------
soundgecko
There's the other problem of decreasing contrast and lack of borders
separating the last ad and first organic search result.

[http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it](http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-
see-it)

[http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-
intentional...](http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-
intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/)

A few years ago this was the style [http://www.ismoip.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/Screen...](http://www.ismoip.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2011/01/Screenshot1.png)

Before that
[http://cdn.userstyles.org/style_screenshot_thumbnails/58617_...](http://cdn.userstyles.org/style_screenshot_thumbnails/58617_after.jpeg)

Now [http://i.imgur.com/Wmdd0.png](http://i.imgur.com/Wmdd0.png)

Some of those keywords are worth tens of dollars per click so no wonder,the
colors have been A/B optmized to get the most clicks from people not knowing
they are ads.

Comparison:

Google: #fff7ec Bing: #f9fcf7 Yahoo: #fafaff DuckDuckGo: (255,212,0,0.18)

Not to say that Bing, Yahoo etc. are much better but I expect more from the
"Do No Evil" Google rather than increasing the next quarter's earnings instead
of targeting older people and people with bad monitors and hurting people who
did a lot of good work to come in the first few in organic results but don't
and/or can't pay Google for expensive ads. Also, Bing and the rest continue to
mostly lose money and they can't afford to separate ads while the big guy
continues to reduce the difference between ads and search results.

"Study:Contrast sensitivity gradually decreases with age"
[http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphol...](http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphologic=0)

~~~
hncommenter13
Note that the FTC agrees with you and recently made an announcement[1]
regarding the shading of the ad result box, among other requirements for
search engines.

The study the FTC cites[2] indicates that fully half of individuals didn't
even realize the page contained ads.

[1]
[http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/06/searchengine.shtm](http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/06/searchengine.shtm)

[2] [http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-
results](http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-awareness-search-results)

------
dakimov
I would use a paid search service with a quality search, no ads, no tracking,
and no selling my data to third-parties.

------
igorgue
scroll down.

