Google Changes Could Decrease Downstream Traffic
Google says it gets smarter every day, but today the company made a big enough leap in what it shows to users that an announcement was in order. The company blog post says that today's improvements are intended to "get you to the web page you want as quickly as possible." Looking at the changes that were made, though, it seems to us like the result will be just the opposite.
A greater number of related queries will now be listed for many searches and longer page excerpts ("snippets") will be shown in response to longer search queries. Those look to us like ways to keep people on Google longer.
It's pretty simple, really. If you're shown a link to another Google search query, you're more likely to perform another search instead of going offsite to visit the first results links you were shown. If you're shown 3 lines of excerpts instead of two, you're more likely to get the full answer to your question without having to visit the page that the answer is on, off-site.
Google has always had a delicate relationship with the sites that it indexes; caching and excerpts have been deemed acceptable because they serve the larger purpose of driving traffic to indexed sites. But ultimately it's more in Google's interest to offer "one-stop shopping" than it is to drive traffic.
Google's search engine is smart enough that users could be given much of what they need right on the Google pages, without ever having to visit the sites the information came from.
One academic study has found that 80-percent of searches people perform online are informational in nature, whereas 10-percent are navigational and another 10-percent are transactional. Today's new search improvements will likely help Google retain a larger portion of the most popular kind of search traffic.
We found those numbers by doing an informational search. The top search result was from Search Engine Land, and lucky for that site the Google "snippet" was incoherent enough that we had to click through and read the full article. It's not hard to imagine snippets getting smarter, though, and sites that provide the information suffering a substantial drop in the largest type of search traffic. Google results are pretty close to that point already and today's announcement seems like a move in that direction. It's a move that will benefit users, but could hurt the sites that Google relies on for the information it's serving up. Who has your sympathy in this case?
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So are the descriptions being take out of the snippets? Is this just for blogs and news sites, or will this change my regular sites too?
They are blurring the line between fair use and content stealing no? Snippets are one thing, but when you start citing entire paragraphs, then that borders on content stealing.
Since Google doesn't create content, anything that they do to keep users from going to the actual content creator's site would be counter-productive for them.
Blocking google's robots would shut off the information flow and if enough sites did this then there would be nothing for Google to display to its users. If sites start to see a decrease in traffic from Google then this may end up happening.
Is there a tool to see how many times your site comes up in a Google search? It would be interesting to see how often people see your stuff on Google compared to how much traffic you get.
Interesting article. The longer snippets used in Google searches doesn't seem like much at first, but it's obvious they're looking to "borrow" more and more of your content for their purposes rather than yours. It's unfortunate that making things easier for internet users often involves pilfering copyrighted material.
Posted by: Ryan Garns
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March 24, 2009 10:09 AM
Wouldn't it be great if you wouldn't have to leave Google for an answer? I think it's great that I often don't leave FF to have conversations. It's all in place, one consistent interface, and super fast. Same can be said for RSS readers... I hope people would just forget about traffic measurements.
Posted by: Meryn Stol
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March 24, 2009 10:17 AM
Not to mention the issues of content-stealing and content-generation, there is a big issue of making it take 150% more time to see as many Google search results. This is a VERY big issue of efficiency!
This is only being used for longer search queries, and those longer search queries account for only a very small percentage of overall search queries. The snippets do not appear to take longer stretches of words from web pages, but more long stretches. This does make it more likely that the answer one is searching for is in Google, but it also makes it a lot easier to identify which web page is the one you want to click through to. But I think Google benefits from the former very much. Google makes money from advertising, and if users don't click on web links, they certainly aren't going to click on ads. A perfect search service that gave answers to all questions on the first search results page would not make a lot of money through advertisers/
I'd say about 5% of my searches are purely for one or two line answers I could get from a search snippet. The other 95% are queries that need much more in-depth answers than Google could provide in a snippet. This change will help me quickly identify the site more likely to have the right answer. Stop worrying.
Without a doubt my "sympathy" lies with those performing the searches. Having a snippet of what's on the page before clicking through will save me plenty of useless clicks when I'm research obscure topics. Thanks, Google!
This is actually increasing our hits at our error collaboration site, http://bug.gd by about 25%. Error messages and questions are typically quite long and people are coming to see the full solutions more than they ever have before.
We're quite pleased with this change.
This becomes very interesting when we start to think in terms of contextual search engines. I think the individuals who are worried about content pilfering have a point.
So at which point is this copyright infringement? How much of others' content does Google have to display for it to be considered infringement, especially if users never visit the original content publisher? I really do not understand why Google can make money using others' content while YouTube users get sued to high heaven for using a snippet of a music track for their home-made videos; they don't even profit from it--YouTube does. Thoughts?
I think this change is GOOD for internet users, and potentially not so good for website owners. I know a lot of times I'm just looking for a phone number for a business, and I think it's great when I don't have to visit CitySearch or YellowPages or whoever to just get the number when it's printed directly on the Google listing.
You gotta remember that Google's job (with organic listings) is to take care of internet users as #1 priority and everything else will fall in line.
Wonder if this was 'really' intended to benefit Google users - just a thought. Not really sure if this is an improvement as much as it is just buzz.
Hi, my name is Jeremy Silber and I'm an engineer at Google who worked with Ken on the dynamic longer snippets project.
Thanks for your comments and questions on our dynamic longer snippets launch. You asked whether longer snippets keep users on Google longer, or reduce the clicks on the search results. These are two of the many measurements we collected when developing this feature, and we didn't see users spending more time on Google. In fact, we saw more users heading straight for a result instead of staying longer on Google, and they were less likely to come back to Google after not finding what they wanted.
Thanks again for your feedback and questions. I'm glad to see that you're thinking about many of the same questions as we are, and I'm happy to report that this change helps users make better decisions without any more time on the result page.
Thanks!
Jeremy Silber
Software Engineer, Google Search User Interface group
All I can say is that there is a real need for a non-profit search engine. I would support is whole heatedly...