12 ms·

In 2020, two thirds of Google searches ended without a click

406 points by randfish 5y ago

mattacular 5y ago
Google has become a really bad search engine for anything besides the most superficial information about a broad range of topics, especially ones that are commercial in nature (which it is extremely good at... go figure). I spent a while trying to find the name of a contemporary artist whose name I forgot by querying those key words along with various things about the thematic etc qualities of their work and all Google could tell me was about Claude Monet. Gave up and searched some of the same keywords on Twitter of all places and instantly found the artist I was looking for.
- bartread 5y ago
  I've had similar issues quite a bit recently and have resorted to trying other search engines. Sadly DuckDuckGo, Bing, Wiby.me (!) and others aren't really better. Good search was historically one of the harder unsolved problems on the web, even back in the 90s. The problem is that nowadays we treat it rather like a solved problem when in reality it's still probably one of the harder unsolved problems on the web.
  - alert0 5y ago
    The thing for me is DDG results aren't worse either though. I'd much rather support them than Google. Very often when I use the g! modifier to redirect the results aren't much better.
    - bartread 5y ago
      It seems people have a pretty mixed experience here. I trialled DDG for several months back in 2019 but switched back to Google after I found myself using !g for almost every search.
kome 5y ago
In other words, the future of the internet (or what remains of it) it's the desktop. Mobiles phones are a walled garden for megacorps.
Jonnax 5y ago
I would say that's about right for me. I Google things for information which I can glean from the search results more than looking for a website. Like what's the definition of a word or a quick calculation is easier than opening the calculator. There's even a metronome if you search metronome.
- kfrzcode 5y ago
  I love the metronome but everytime I reset the tempo my volume resets to 100% :(
- tppiotrowski 5y ago
  Weather is another big one. The Google weather widget is well done and every time the Safari omnibar takes me to weather.com I am displeased.
  - BrianOnHN 5y ago
    > takes me to weather.com I am displeased. Likewise, but with Google's own search, not safari.
- spicybright 5y ago
  I wonder if they do some light A/B testing to see if not clicking is because of this or not.
- shtack 5y ago
  +1 to this. Weather, translations, timezones, quick math, sports scores (searching “nba” gives a much cleaner interface than going to nba.com), not to mention Wikipedia snippets. That easily covers >50% of my searches.
  - CodeIsTheEnd 5y ago
    If you're looking for a clean, fast interface for sports scores, I built https://plaintextsports.com https://plaintextsports.com to do exactly that.
- 5y ago
ProAm 5y ago
You provide the content, they'll accept the revenue
- gruez 5y ago
  Right, because if you don't provide the content (you can opt out), someone else will, and they'll get 33% of the traffic.
- prepend 5y ago
  If I put content out on the web with no login, then thats what I do. If I want to control the revenue then I use a different protocol. I can also just simply set up a robots.txt file telling others what to do with it and lots of indexers, Google included, respect and abide by my wishes. When people misuse a tool it seems easily fixed by them properly using the tool. Trying to change the web because I’m too stupid to understand it seems like a bad thing.
ketzo 5y ago
This seems like... a really big deal? I know that we're all sort of living in a world where "put ads on your high-traffic site" is a deeply outdated revenue model, but it's still quite a popular one, depending on what corner of the internet you're in.
- ilikehurdles 5y ago
  I think that model is as relevant as ever. Google is just narrowing the list of “high-traffic” sites worth putting your ads on, to exclusively Google properties.
  - cma 5y ago
    I'm fairly sure they block wikipedia on medical searches not due to accuracy, but due to drug ads on webmd etc. that use Google for ads.
    - lucasmullens 5y ago
      I tried 5 different diseases, 4 had wikipedia on the first page, 1 had it on the top of the second page. Do you mean blocking just that automated text result that appears on the top of the page for some questions? That would make sense, since they probably don't want to boldly state medical facts without context, especially since that feature can be wrong sometimes. Disclaimer: I work for Google, not on anything related
      - cma 5y ago
        No I meant the result itself, but I see it too now, I thought they were blocked altogether. I don't know if it is changed or it was always just never/rarely near the top (and maybe that legitimately organically happens). Searching 'ADHD' and Wikipedia's extensive page is midway down the second page of results. Drug ads for amphetamines from Google on 3 or 4 of the first page's results, but not the top few results (which are CDC, NHS, etc.).
  - moate 5y ago
rawtxapp 5y ago
So are we trusting similarweb's data on Google itself? How trustworthy is it? How do they get their data? I've seen similarweb be off by magnitudes vs alexa for estimating traffic on some sites I own.
allochthon 5y ago
Often I'm looking for a Wikipedia page, and it seems that in the past year or so Wikipedia pages have been moved way down on the first page of search results, especially if the topic is a medical one.
- prepend 5y ago
  I noticed this too and now suffix any query that I think Wikipedia is best at with “wiki.” This is faster for me that opening Wikipedia and searching.
  - cgriswald 5y ago
    I add “wiki” too, but I made it a keyword search command to use Wikipedia’s search and cut out the middleman altogether.
    - cruano 5y ago
      You can prefix your search with "!w" on DuckDuckGo, bangs[1] are a neat feature and what actually made me switch [1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
      - gxqoz 5y ago
        This is effectively the same as the "wiki [query]" search shortcut you can add to a browser. This is useful, but there are also situations where I want to get to the search engine's results page but weighted towards the wiki content. Wikipedia search will always send you to the page for an exact match. There are times where I want to see the search results instead.
  - georgiecasey 5y ago
    so do i, and you look at related searches and adding wiki is the top one. surely this is a signal to Google?
- Robotbeat 5y ago
airhead969 5y ago
Don't ogle Google, https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com instead.
- karlshea 5y ago
  I use DDG as my default engine on my phone, and about 50% of the time I have to re-search on Google with g! because I'm not finding what I'm looking for. That's not to say the results on Google aren't getting worse, because they are, but DDG still has a long way to go.
- ancarda 5y ago
  Doesn't DDG do the same thing? DDG will show a snippet from Wikipedia, has a built in calculator, built in timer, and so on... Sure, Google also has a flight tracker widget, but it's not that much worse than DDG. If you really want no widgets or inline responses, https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ has that. EDIT: Startpage does have a time widget (search for "time in <some place>"), but doesn't have a calculator, timer, or literally anything else. How odd...
- Demonsult 5y ago
  I recently realized DuckDuckGo's !sp operator can give you Google results anonymously via Startpage.com "Startpage acts as an intermediary between you and Google, so your searches are completely private. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. Google never sees you and does not know who made the request; they only see Startpage."
croes 5y ago
At some point Google will overdo it and they will be split up.
- moate 5y ago
  I think that time was "a while ago" and they're still running because the US doesn't actually care that much about virtual monopolies.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    Since Regan, the US doesn't care about concentration of market power, only whether prices for consumers are affected. Since Google services are "free", no anti-trust violations are incurred under this standard. However, it's looking like things might be changing slightly. Biden appointed someone that cares about anti-trust. We'll have to see if that's just for show or not like most of his administration.
  - croes 5y ago
    They are just very slow.
  - angryasian 5y ago
    Monopolies are a barrier to entry. I don't think any of google's products prevent that. As we see in most technology over the last 20 years, the companies at the top can change fast. A company that creates a better search engine, will easily take over search. Next gen of search will be better at providing more relevant / less spam Youtube does have some network effect and high costs but not enough to stop anyone from competing and vc money evens out the costs. Next gen in video may offer more features, or for a completely different platform like VR The only platform I do see them having a strong ability to block out potential competition would be mobile and Android.
    - SomewhatLikely 5y ago
      Can you provide examples of better companies replacing the incumbent in a mature market? Most examples I can think of occurred in markets that were a tiny fraction of their mature size. Most of Google's users weren't using search engines when Google was created. Most of facebook's users weren't using social media when Facebook was created. In these cases it's less about converting existing users as it is about capturing new users.
jeffbee 5y ago
This "panel" must be highly biased, right? Only Google itself knows the real answer to this question. The data in the article comes from 100 million people dumb enough to infect their devices with malware.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  > Only Google itself knows the real answer to this question This alone should be setting off alarm bells for everyone, the government should be raiding Google offices to find the necessary facts to answer these questions. Google operates as the de facto front page of the Internet, the default starting point for the vast majority of the public, and they're incredibly dodgy about the real facts about how they use that power. It's incredible how often Google both states a "fact" that is extremely biased in their favor, and simultaneously suggest it's indisputable because only Google has data on it, and of course, Google will not share the data because it's confidential business information. This stonewall is behind incredible lies like the idea that targeted advertising increases revenue by 50%, despite independent data finding the difference closer to 4%. I think the issue at hand here, is that Google should be legally compelled to disclose the real answers to this question, and a lot of other questions about how their algorithms work. > The data in the article comes from 100 million people dumb enough to infect their devices with malware This is ironic, considering the Google Toolbar, headed by Sundar Pichai himself, is much of how Google got it's mass adaption as well as browsing data to improve their search rankings. Perhaps the difference between "malware" and "useful tool" is how successful the business behind it is. ;)
  - shortstuffsushi 5y ago
    > the government should be raiding Google offices I can't get behind this. Suggesting that corporations be raided by the government is not a good idea. To my knowledge, Google has not denied any information requests they've received (or been subpoenaed for), and actively work with law enforcement in circumstances required of them. If we get to a point where they stand in contempt of court ordered information requests, perhaps this becomes appropriate, but let's not jump straight there because they're a big (huge) company. Many, if not most companies have private information that only they would know about their company and don't have the expectation of turning it over, I don't think scale changes that.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic Search drove this decline.
- dawnerd 5y ago
  I was kinda thinking the same too until I went back and gave bing and DDG a shot and well, Google is still way better for my searches. I think its more of the seo spam that popping up thats making the results look less useful.
  - bick_nyers 5y ago
    That would be an interesting problem, how do you algorithmically filter out SEO and focus on useful information? A signal vs. noise problem, but on human text, with the added challenge that the noise is trying to outsmart you. Maybe an adversarial ML network with an SEO-generating bot working against you?
    - Const-me 5y ago
      Technically, trivially simple: detect and penalize ads. You can even reuse an ad.blocker's database for the detection.
- echelon 5y ago
  My guess is that you're part of an unprofitable long tail. Why optimize for your use case when they can capture customers that bring more money with far less effort? I wager that most people don't perceive a decline in search results quality. At least not to an extent where they'd notice and switch to using Bing.
  - yakubin 5y ago
latenightcoding 5y ago
Quoting part of a comment I posted on HN in 2018: "love monetizing niche search engines and other data products, but it looks like Google will eventually get into any industry where the main source of traffic is organic search, I wonder what is next."
boromi 5y ago
Google anything... more than half the page is irrelevant adds.
vishnumohandas 5y ago
On one hand I’m sad that Google as the Oracle is killing businesses and lives. On the other hand I’m excited about other portals that will open up. This just cannot be how things end.
thepete2 5y ago
That's definitely a tendency that you'd expect when sites are engineered for engagement and everybody starts out at google. I guess it also means google completely controls the experience of most people on the internet.
newsbinator 5y ago
2/3rds of my Google searches are: * current time [city] * [city] weather * [city] covid
- gxqoz 5y ago
  Are you like frequently traveling to different cities based on the covid level? Is your behavior somehow changing significantly due to slight differences in covid deaths in your city?
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    Yes, correct
searchableguy 5y ago
Google provides instant answers for most medical queries, calculations, celebrities, sports, news, weather, how-tos, definitions, reviews, map, shopping, images, etc. Most people don't search outside of queries that google can answer from their own sources frequently so this seems plausible.
- jfk13 5y ago
  It provides instant answers, but in my experience they're frequently not the answer to what you actually asked, or they're just plain wrong. (YMMV: it depends on your specific searches, I'm sure.)
- rchaud 5y ago
  This type of "no-click search" is infuriating because of how often people take the snippet Google spits out at face value, without the context that a full article might have provided.
- deckard1 5y ago
  Those instant answer cards are often wrong. Perhaps more troubling are the instant answers Google gives you but you aren't aware they are wrong. It's the Gell-Mann Amnesia. Considering 2/3rd of searches end there, I wonder how many people are walking around with false information that Google fed them.
thomascgalvin 5y ago
If Google ever started including copy-pasteable code from Stack Overflow, I might never follow a link from Google again. Which I think says a lot about how Google is used now. I don't use Google to find web pages, I use it to find an answer to a pressing question. When I'm looking for something to read, I go to a content aggregator like HN or Reddit. Of course this isn't sustainable. If Google is just presenting other sites' data "for" them, and thus depriving them of traffic and revenue, eventually there won't be any incentive to create the content Google is scraping. Long term, this seems self-defeating for Google, just as its ruinous to the sites they scrape.
- californical 5y ago
  I don’t know about Google, but I’ve gotten relevant Stack Overflow code snippets pretty regularly from DDG
  - buzzerbetrayed 5y ago
    But so few people use DDG. It probably isn’t much of an issue for stack overflow. If Google started doing that, my guess is that stack overflow would feel it.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      So, do you think it's fine that DDG is doing it? Is the act itself bad, or only the outcome it has due to Google's marketshare?
- tasogare 5y ago
  I don’t particularly like the press, but as a profession they recognized quickly the danger of Google displaying directly their content on the results page. Too bad they fought only for themselves and not for the web in general, since they’re holding enough power to tip the scale.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  > eventually there won't be any incentive to create the content Google is scraping It's an interesting hypothesis, but it assumes the only reason people bother to seek and aggregate facts is to get paid (and the only way to get paid is click-through to ads). No doubt that early surfacing of data could disrupt payment-for-visit-dependent models, but that doesn't guarantee the data evaporates from Google's view or that new payment models don't arise to replace the old.
Robotbeat 5y ago
Half of my Googles are literally just using Google as a calculator.
- allenu 5y ago
  I used to do that until I realized on Mac, I can just cmd-spacebar to do Spotlight search and type my equation in there.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    I don’t have a Mac. Does Spotlight handle units as well as Google does? Also, doing the calculation in Google is handy because it’s easy to share in a modifiable way.
    - allenu 5y ago
      I don't know how well it handles units vs. Google but it does convert as you type, say "5inches" immediately shows it in cm but you can keep typing "5inches in m" and it'll do the math too.
    - adav 5y ago
      Spotlight handles the majority of unit conversions and quick calculations that Google can do. I think it is, or was, powered by Wolfram Alpha.
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        Wolfram Alpha is pretty good and is more powerful than Google Calculator, but I’ve found Google Calculator to be more responsive and consistent and thus a bit easier for regular usage.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - Graffur 5y ago
    Thanks for posting that. I never knew that. It does currency conversion too but unfortunately not crypto
criddell 5y ago
> the zero-click search problem is likely to rise even more I have a hard time seeing this as a problem.
- phpnode 5y ago
  As a user? sure. People who create and curate content quite often want to be paid for their work, they create businesses to support themselves, often in the form of a website. If Google scrapes and repackages that content, so the searcher never even visits the creator's site, what incentive does the creator have to continue making content freely available?
  - criddell 5y ago
    The zero-click queries that I've done have been for fairly simple facts that I think most of us would agree should be zero-click. What are some examples that I could try that show results that you think should require me to click through?
bartread 5y ago
I suspect a bunch of people might jump on the bandwagon that this is Google repackaging others' content into search snippets and robbing their sites of traffic. No doubt there's some truth to that, but I'd like to indulge in a slightly different flavour of Google bashing on this occasion. The reason I often don't click through on search results is that the search results are garbage - either irrelevant or poor quality. I'm in the midst of refurbing and redecorating my house. Often I'll need to do some research on topics related to that, and when I do that I often find I need to refine my search query to find anything of relevance, even sometimes digging through several pages of results manually to find a really useful page. And then there's work: I still haven't found any answers on this, but one of the things that's on my mind about becoming a more senior business leader is that I feel like I'm changing as a person. I feel like the way I think about problems and people is changing. That's to some extent to be expected, but the issue is I'm feeling ambivalent about some of the changes I perceive. So it's about the effect that leadership has on the leader (selfish, I realise). But when I start searching around this topic, what does Google want to show me? Pages and pages of results about change management or, when it's being marginally less of a village idiot, pages and pages of results about leadership styles and changing leadership style. Neither of these is what I'm talking about. A human will understand that, but Google doesn't, and I'm finding that increasingly to be a problem when I'm looking for information: either, (i) my results are overwhelmed with low-grade spammy SEO'd to hell and back content, or (ii) Google's AI is too bloody stupid and pig-ignorant to understand what I'm talking about. Hence I don't click through on the search results the majority of the time.
- jsight 5y ago
  I'm seeing very similar issues. Google seems to heavily favor sending people to the sites with the highest content volume instead of the highest quality content. The worst thing is that content creators are manipulating this to build content farms full of low quality content and overwhelming ad volumes. I miss the old web where Google was really great at finding that one guy's blog post that was actually useful.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    > instead of the highest quality content That's a tall order - Google doesn't know the quality of the content, only how popular it is. Right now it's based on data science pooled from existing search result clicks, but originally it was based on the amount of backlinks each site had - so instead of user viewership and satisfaction, it was dependant on the amount of nerds at the time who had already found the site/article useful. The internet has grown enough to mean that everyone else vastly outweighs nerds in terms of backlinks and clicks for any particular topic.
Robotbeat 5y ago
It’s not all bad. I consider it a feature that Google usually pulls the right information from Wikipedia. It doesn’t harm Wikipedia, which is free anyway, but reduces their bandwidth load.
- panopticon 5y ago
  That's not strictly true. Wikipedia is crowed-sourced, and losing visitors means losing potential contributors. You could probably make the case that someone who would rather read the snippet on Google isn't likely to contribute, but it likely has an effect on the margin. And that's ignoring the donate banner they throw up there from time to time.
  - izacus 5y ago
    Google will start paying for that content though https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22334276/wikimedia-enterprise-api-service-big-tech-knowledge-boxes https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22334276/wikimedia-enterp...
MattGaiser 5y ago
Google provides tons of data itself. I search stock prices on it. No clicks there. I search weather on it. No click there. There are all sorts a little utilities that are now just part of Google.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Yup. Weather, stocks, various bits of statistical info like GDP and population, and image searches. Image searches are super awesome for learning some things in ways you didn’t expect.
lolive 5y ago
In 2014, the Google Knowledge Graph was a good way for Google to redirect Wikipedia page views to its own ecosystem. Good job Google! https://wikipediocracy.com/2014/01/06/googles-knowledge-graph-killing-wikipedia/ https://wikipediocracy.com/2014/01/06/googles-knowledge-grap...
- prepend 5y ago
  As long as they use the content appropriately that’s a good thing as it reduces web traffic to Wikipedia and saves them money. The purpose of Wikipedia is to improve human knowledge and all their content is CC so unless Google is altering content or biasing searches, sucking it into Knowledge graph seems like one of the main reasons Wikipedia started.
Mauricebranagh 5y ago
How much is this due to mobile search quite often I do a search with auto complete on my phone - then add a modifier to get the search you want.
sharkweek 5y ago
Many moons ago, I put a ton of work into a (now defunct) content site that provided specific information in a small vertical. Each post took hours, but I enjoyed writing the articles, and the revenue from the ads was enough to enjoy a little extra cash every month (we're talking just about enough to cover a car payment, for context). Google decided they liked a lot of the content and started providing it in their knowledge graph. It was initially great to be validated and the link to my content at the top of the search result was pretty cool to see. But it did tank traffic, as Google scraping my content and giving it away at the top of their search result page meant people didn't need to navigate to my site. Felt pretty terrible, if I'm being honest, but I also have always subscribed to understanding the risks for relying on other networks for my own benefit. BUT!!! As a regular user of search engines, I love getting the answer super fast without necessarily having to guess what sort of ad-trap I'll have to navigate to get the answer I'm looking for on some random content site. As a user, when I'm asking some non-critical question, it's nice to just get a snappy answer. I appreciate it. The problem of course arises when content creators stop making the content for Google to scrape and index, what then?
- irrational 5y ago
  Did they scrape your content and put it into their own database? That is, if you had deleted all of your content, would it still have appeared in the Google results?
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure Google is rather quick to delete dead listings, but their is a twilight period where pages persist in results. This is especially annoying with forums hosting dead and un-archived links.
    - joshspankit 5y ago
      I’m pretty sure Google actually deletes nothing. The original goal was to have all data digitized in 200 years. Of course, they remove things from results and from public view, but delete? I suspect no.
at-fates-hands 5y ago
I now use google as a last resort. I start on DDG or Bing and go from there. If those are dead ends, I will reluctantly use Google as a means of last resort. There are so many ads and now every time I search for something on Google, the first five results aren't even related to what I'm looking for. You search for "hifi headphones" and you get eight of the top ten searches are something like, "The top 10 hifi headphones." in an article from three or four years ago. Or "What you need to know about buying hifi headphones." informational articles. Not to mention the obligatory Amazon product link stuffing at the top of any product search results. Google's results are just so convoluted, its a real PIA to try and wade through everything they're advertising in order to get to an actual product or manufacturing website these days - I just gave up a few years ago. Too much advertising and not enough organic results to be useful anymore.
wnevets 5y ago
As a consumer I absolutely that google provides the answers I need without having to click on any sites.
davide_v 5y ago
It's actually something good (expecially for Google) since the information found is now usually in the results itself instead of inside a website. If you notice, in the last years, Google shows you lists extracted from articles, makes calculations directly, answer simple questions like age, shows a lot of Wikipedia info for any person/movie on the right, etc, etc. It's not because there is more ads or because the results are irrelevant, actually I'm never disappointed by the results.
AimForTheBushes 5y ago
I usually append 'reddit' to my google searches. It doesn't necessary provide better results but I love the plain text format.
truxten 5y ago
I wonder if you'll see more domain specific content aggregators/search engines pop up as people (like myself) because increasingly dissatisfied with the almost populist nature of a lot of Google's search results.
tyingq 5y ago
I wonder if an AMP click counts as a click or not.
Jerry2 5y ago
Anyone have any opinions on the state of image search? What do you use? I find Google Image search, which I used to love, filled with absolute garbage now. 90% of links are to Pinterest which greets you with usual overlays, signup modals etc. I use DDG's image search because I find Google's search unusable. Also, Yandex image search is probably the best reverse image search on the market. It's crazy how much better it is than Google.
- kilroy123 5y ago
  Yup I agree. It's surprisingly better.
- colordrops 5y ago
  It's not that google isn't capable of providing much better search. It's that they are driven by interests other than the users actually doing the search. Google has some of the most advanced tech and engineers in the world. But they also have an endless list of issues they must address - no facial recognition, no racial bias, no sexual content, filtering specific politics, supporting partners, etc.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    They also face huge amounts of legal pressure to make GI less useful and stripping out features so that more people follow through to the site and see the adverts.
- diegocg 5y ago
  Bing image search is much better too
  - godshatter 5y ago
    !bi on DDG for me.
- npteljes 5y ago
  DDG is ridiculous with resolutions. Categorizes 500×900 resolution as "Large". Otherwise it works for me as an image search engine. I usually return to google if I absolutely can't find what I'm looking for - google is better when it has to guess, with instructions like "yellow blob old game".
deleted 5y ago
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ev1 5y ago
As a developer: This seems questionable. As a user: thank fuck i dont need to click through to those piece of shit sites that are nothing but spam and ad farms that front load fake description and title content
fractionalhare 5y ago
The author speculates that this is a direct side effect of Google searches being monetized by ads, and therefore targeting multiple searches. I don't think that's the case. I think this has more to do with the fact that Google now deliberately surfaces as much information - including summaries, answers, tools and widgets - in the search results page itself, which incentivizes searching without a subsequent click. Google very much wants you to end your search journey on google.com, but I think that's because they believe it will keep people coming back. I do not think Google directly tries to keep people searching for the same thing. This may still raise interesting antitrust concerns though.
sebringj 5y ago
I think this is mostly due to the immediate messaging they give on the topic that is sufficient and no further click is needed. Meaning the little drop down suggestions more often than not for me has the full content I want. For example, "What is the meaning of temporal?" or 'Who wrote "Wild Thing?"'. Google has inline calculators and an amazing array of usefulness without needing a website to go to in so many cases growing more and more. What is kind of sad/funny about this is its making the search results themselves less useful in which it was built on, giving less incentive to give this AI food.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
About a decade ago or so, I remember complaining about Google's search result quality having already declined then. Specifically, I think my complaint was that the search results were a lot higher quality in the mid-2000s, and then from then on, the search results ended up becoming progressively more sanitized and crafted. So, I mean, we're way, way past Google's heyday. It's not even close. But it's interesting to me that I can recall having those discussions that many years ago, and that people still complain about the same issue today. In fact, just about every other search engine is better in my opinion.
- deleted 5y ago
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lmeyerov 5y ago
I googled for 'soc 2 multitenancy requirements' this morning then gave up and went to bing....
SomewhatLikely 5y ago
Article says clicks to other Google properties don't count as clicks. I would be curious how many searches end up in a click to YouTube. I know my fraction has gone up over time as it's more likely someone has put up a video about some finer point of one of my hobbies than it is they post a blog. At least in these cases the content creator can often still monetize these searches.
JasonFruit 5y ago
All of my Google searches have now ended. I use DuckDuckGo exclusively, and while there was a time when I used to add !g to about every tenth search, I have not felt that need more than about once a week for several months now. DuckDuckGo is simply enough improved, and Google enough worsened, that it's not worth it anymore. From my point of view, Google has blown the vast advantage they had, and is now second-best.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> 2/3rds of Google Searches Now End Without a Click Isn't that the whole point of Google providing it's own interpretation (sometimes several of them) of an answer to the search query ahead of the classic search results: give users what they are likely to be looking for without requiring another click? > zero-click search problem As a user, I see zero-click searches as a benefit, not a problem. It's a problem for people trying to use Google as a “clickstream” to waste my time and try to get a crack at my money, but then, that's exactly why it is a benefit to me.
kickopotomus 5y ago
Could someone here shed some light on the possible copyright implications of how Google now rips excerpts from web pages and displays them directly on the search results page? A cursory search shows that there have been a few lawsuits in the past[1][2] but they seem mostly related to the act of indexing/caching web pages and the display of thumbnails. However, Google's new method of extracting and displaying possible answers to queries from external sources instead of simply linking to those sources feels like it falls outside of the bounds of fair use. [1]: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33810.html https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33810.html [2]: https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/copyright-law/a-balanced-view-on-search-engine-liability-for-copyright-infringement.php#:~:text=The%20status%20of%20a%20search,unauthorized%20web%20pages%20and%20sites https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/copyright-law/a-b....
- jccooper 5y ago
  Most material they're scraping is copyrighted, and reproducing it without permissions would be prohibited save for the various "fair use" provisions. Google would probably make a "de minimis" defense of the practice. A previous case (Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation 2002) allowed thumbnails in search engines as fair use, but that's not quite the same. And current interpretation seems to be pretty restrictive on what's insignificant enough (witness various music sampling cases). And while any individual result may be small, doing so on an industrial scale is probably not "a trifle" and harm can probably be demonstrated. Ultimately, it would have to be tried to tell. They might also argue implied license. In cases like meta tags, that's probably reasonable. For straight-up scraping, it's more questionable.
MAXPOOL 5y ago
Search is the most important application of AI inside Google. It's the raison d'être for data collection. So why the search quality decreases? My current hypothesis is: Users who click ads and generate ad revenue like this garbage. Google learns to serve this outlier group of users. Killing the experience for everyone else is just a side effect.
superasn 5y ago
This is going to be happening more and more as technologies like GPT-3 get better and better. I remember seeing a demo which accurately answered a lot of search questions like who killed Mahatma gandhi, etc just using the GPT-3 model(1). I'm sure Google must have even better models than this and it only makes sense for them to answer the questions directly when there is sufficient confidence level. (1) https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060?lang=en https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060?l...
paulpauper 5y ago
google search results are nothing but content farms and other mostly useless shit unless you search for things that are STEM-related or academic-related.
scudd 5y ago
I admit I sometimes use google search as a spell check that's a simple Ctrl + T away. I'm not proud, but it's so simple to access when you're already in the browser.
rantwasp 5y ago
of course there is no click. a lot of search traffic is machines (machines don’t click) + a lot of the results come in on the SERP.
bob1029 5y ago
I think the issue here is really simple. Google has learned that it is more profitable to infer the intent of a query & tell people what to think up front based upon a carefully crafted set of advertiser criteria. It is difficult to appease your paying customers when you give the non-paying customers direct access to the most likely match for their query and allow them to draw their own conclusions from the information. Put differently, there is a conflict of interest inherent in the very nature of Google's business. It can only become a steeper death spiral from here if the motive continues to be profit above all else.
thrower123 5y ago
This is what Google has been trying to do, right? As they keep scraping more and more information out of the sites that they index and then provide thumbnail answers in the results page, there's no reason to click on anything. If I google for the weather in Chicago, I'm not going to click on a link to weather.com for it, because the seven day forecast is right there. If I google for information about a person, Google scrapes Wikipedia and puts that right in the results page sidebar. Flight information, bus schedules, anything that looks like a calculation, a whole bevy of other things, Google just preempts any results and shows inline at the top of the search page. Why would you click through to anything?
marcodiego 5y ago
Alternatives I've been using: searx[0] and millionshort[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx [1] https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
- bordercases 5y ago
  Thanks!
sinemetu11 5y ago
Do AMP clicks count as no click since the user didn't leave google? And how many are no click because google has presented semi-correct but not really correct information at the top of the results so the user finds what they think they're looking for without actually clicking? Seems like google is doing just fine so I'd imagine both of the above scenarios account for a significant portion.
Beached 5y ago
looking over the comments here, people seem to be assuming this is because of googles scraping and presenting of data on the search results page. but knowing my experiences with google search over the past few years, I immediately assumed this was because google search is getting worse and worse every day. after reading the article, the author doesn't correlate the findings with a cause, so who knows what the real reason for this is. but I know for me at least, it now takes me 3, 4 or 5 searches to find an abstract with something that looks even close. maybe I such at google searches, but after doing hundreds a day for over 12 years, I feel google search just got reaaaal shitty some time in the past few years. ddg use to not even be close to google in result quality, now, imo, they are on par with each other. and that is largely due to googles decline, ddg only got slightly better.
xnx 5y ago
This seems like very good progress. I'm continually impressed by how fast I can find the answers I'm looking for from Google. Google is working hard from being somewhere to get pointers to places that might contain the information you want to giving you the answers directly. Truly amazing.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
I'm confused by the top comment using this headline to complain about the quality of results. The quality of results is obviously irrelevant to the fact that most searches do not result in clicks. Google specifically tries to answer your question on the result page: "nifarious" - oh, it's spelled "nefarious" "1000 USD in CHF" - aha, about 1000 swiss francs 4 tablespoons in cups - 1/4 cup "how old is taylor swift" - 31 years; this shows up in the suggested search dropdown, so you don't even need to hit the result page
- missedthecue 5y ago
  This is what I was going to comment. Aside from all the tools like weather, converters, timers, etc..., google has even gotten good at pulling content out of articles so you don't need to click. It displays it in the search results. For instance, searching something like "what is the most common car color" shows me an exerpt of the answer from a article on automobilemag.com without having to click and read the whole thing. 5-7 years ago, I would've had to click and skim through an article. Moreover, Google compiles independent lists of their own. Searching "what animals mate for life" or "movies tomorrow cruise has been in" will pull up an interactive list. No click-through required.
- hunter-2 5y ago
  >The quality of results is obviously irrelevant to the fact that most searches do not result in clicks. Disagree. It's completely relevant. There are two reasons why people do not click on search results - either because they got the answer directly from the rich snippets (like you suggest), or because the results are so trash that you need to now perform another search to narrow the results further.
bttrfl 5y ago
If I were to build my own search engine: - I'd make sure that multipurpose sites get lower ranks, ecommerce with a blog would get worse rank than a stand alone blog or an ecommerce. this would eliminate all the content marketing and owners would have to focus on their core business - I would put a cap on amount of content that increases rank. A website with a million recipes harvested from other sites won't be better than a blog with 10 quality recipes. - I would downgrade rank for use of third-party cookies, invasive ads etc. - I would give users an option to "mute" a website - Randomise top results to make sure no one can "occupy" top spots.
danmg 5y ago
Most queries don't require further action. You can glean the information you were looking for from the results themselves. This is particularly true when you use google as a spell checker.
squarefoot 5y ago
Not going to change, since Google has become a huge advertising container with less and less value wrt genuine information about products. If I search for a product to buy, I usually add the "price" word to it so that the search engines includes shops selling that product. All fine, but if I want to read reviews (real ones, not the usual paid fakes) or blogs in which a product features, compatibility etc. are discussed, which is very common in IT hardware, I don't want Google to throw at me a pageful of its top sponsors. No thanks, I don't care, I'm perfectly able to find a place where to shop; what I want from a search engine depicting itself as intelligent is to know when I want technical information and stop defaulting nearly every damn result to a shop to buy from.
loopz 5y ago
Bogus metric when search results might contain enough answer to majority of sincere queries.
cambalache 5y ago
90% of my Google queries is "Search terms + Reddit".Usually I end up with better quality info. Reddit is missing a great opportunity there, especially because its search engine sucks (They should use algolia or something). If they were more visionary they could use their internal search as a starting point for a generic web searcher.
zuhayeer 5y ago
What's disappointing about this is how inaccurate some of the information is. For example, we even go the extra step of adding the OccupationSchema meta tag on Levels.fyi for salary data to be shown on queries. However, Google only uses the base salary component and not the total key, which highly misleads people into taking what's shown as 'per year' as the total compensation, especially since there isn't even a clarification for it on the salary cards. Still think it does make for a better user experience overall, just wish they'd add these details to some of these Search schemas they themselves adopted for the purpose of getting more pinpointed info.
vernie 5y ago
It's quite common for teenagers on TikTok to use a screenshot of the often-wrong snippet at the top of the Google results page as evidence in whatever crusade they're currently on.
oblib 5y ago
That doesn't surprise me. I look up answers to questions and definitions of words using google and seldom click through because I get what I need in the results. Not sure that's 2/3 of my usage of Google but that may not be far off.
gergi 5y ago
In the article, what does CTR stand for? Did miss it?
Siira 5y ago
I find this a very good result. It's especially good on bad network connections.
secondcoming 5y ago
I find myself going to page 2 more and more.
zupreme 5y ago
If the article mentioned the data having been filtered to not include automated queries I missed it. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of today’s Google searches are not being made by machines, scripts, etc. Desktop vs mobile was mentioned but that doesn’t necessarily prove that the traffic is “human”.
rongenre 5y ago
It would be great if a nonprofit decided to come up with its own internet index and duplicate the functionality of circa-2000 google. Imagine it could be done for under 10M?
rvba 5y ago
The worst is that Google doesnt care, since they dont fix old bugs, they only ship new products that fail.
TeeMassive 5y ago
Today I was working on an old project and I had to create a tfsignore file. I only got links to gitignore, even if I added 'TFS' as a keyword. In finally ended up directly searching SO and found the Microsoft documentation.
altspace 5y ago
A lot of time I get my answer in the “people also ask”section of the google search result. The section has exactly the paragraph with the relevant information. Maybe, search results are getting better?
RedComet 5y ago
Google search results have been pitiful the last few years.
emrah 5y ago
Google's zero-click answers are really good, especially if I search for a fact. While it's true that this is possibly killing sites by preventing traffic flow, it's one way to battle content padding for the sake of grabbing traffic. It might be an interesting move if Google were to pay a small fee to sites whose information was useful for a particular search, like those I chose to expand.
devops000 5y ago
The other 1/3 are bot clicks ads.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
They really should pay wikipedia.
zimpenfish 5y ago
Anecdata: I was searching for macOS stuff last week (trying to get something working because Big Sur has changed a bunch of stuff) and, most of the time, the top results where from 2011-15. Completely useless.
egberts 5y ago
Meanwhile, plugging in unfamiliar phone numbers no longer produces useful results at Google.com, as they WANT you to click in for more information.
forgotpwd16 5y ago
It should be noted that Google (applies to other search engines) searches aren't just web searches anymore. Rather Google is frequently used as knowledge engine similar to WolframAlpha albeit not in that level (yet). Specifically a click-less Google search can be: spell checking (term "wrng wrd") dictionary (term "define word") word translation (term "random in greek") calculator (term "1+1") unit conversion (term "1m in ft") weather (term "weather tokyo") sport scores (term "uefa scores", or ufc, nba, ...) map instructions (term "instructions to nearest city") For fun search any of the aforementioned terms alone (besides the first one) and with term mentioned in parentheses. Also lots of searches return card information (e.g. "spell checker" or "Issac Newton") or snippets which are seen when searching for instructions. That is when searching something encyclopedic where one-line summary or some simple instructions will suffice means someone will not go ahead and open Wikipedia or any other site.

406 points by randfish 5y ago

Google has become a really bad search engine for anything besides the most superficial information about a broad range of topics, especially ones that are commercial in nature (which it is extremely good at... go figure). I spent a while trying to find the name of a contemporary artist whose name I forgot by querying those key words along with various things about the thematic etc qualities of their work and all Google could tell me was about Claude Monet. Gave up and searched some of the same keywords on Twitter of all places and instantly found the artist I was looking for.

bartread 5y ago
I've had similar issues quite a bit recently and have resorted to trying other search engines. Sadly DuckDuckGo, Bing, Wiby.me (!) and others aren't really better. Good search was historically one of the harder unsolved problems on the web, even back in the 90s. The problem is that nowadays we treat it rather like a solved problem when in reality it's still probably one of the harder unsolved problems on the web.
- alert0 5y ago
  The thing for me is DDG results aren't worse either though. I'd much rather support them than Google. Very often when I use the g! modifier to redirect the results aren't much better.
  - bartread 5y ago
    It seems people have a pretty mixed experience here. I trialled DDG for several months back in 2019 but switched back to Google after I found myself using !g for almost every search.

kome 5y ago

In other words, the future of the internet (or what remains of it) it's the desktop. Mobiles phones are a walled garden for megacorps.

Jonnax 5y ago

I would say that's about right for me. I Google things for information which I can glean from the search results more than looking for a website. Like what's the definition of a word or a quick calculation is easier than opening the calculator. There's even a metronome if you search metronome.

kfrzcode 5y ago
I love the metronome but everytime I reset the tempo my volume resets to 100% :(
tppiotrowski 5y ago
Weather is another big one. The Google weather widget is well done and every time the Safari omnibar takes me to weather.com I am displeased.
- BrianOnHN 5y ago
  > takes me to weather.com I am displeased. Likewise, but with Google's own search, not safari.
spicybright 5y ago
I wonder if they do some light A/B testing to see if not clicking is because of this or not.
shtack 5y ago
+1 to this. Weather, translations, timezones, quick math, sports scores (searching “nba” gives a much cleaner interface than going to nba.com), not to mention Wikipedia snippets. That easily covers >50% of my searches.
- CodeIsTheEnd 5y ago
  If you're looking for a clean, fast interface for sports scores, I built https://plaintextsports.com https://plaintextsports.com to do exactly that.
5y ago

ProAm 5y ago

You provide the content, they'll accept the revenue

gruez 5y ago
Right, because if you don't provide the content (you can opt out), someone else will, and they'll get 33% of the traffic.
prepend 5y ago
If I put content out on the web with no login, then thats what I do. If I want to control the revenue then I use a different protocol. I can also just simply set up a robots.txt file telling others what to do with it and lots of indexers, Google included, respect and abide by my wishes. When people misuse a tool it seems easily fixed by them properly using the tool. Trying to change the web because I’m too stupid to understand it seems like a bad thing.

ketzo 5y ago

This seems like... a really big deal? I know that we're all sort of living in a world where "put ads on your high-traffic site" is a deeply outdated revenue model, but it's still quite a popular one, depending on what corner of the internet you're in.

ilikehurdles 5y ago
I think that model is as relevant as ever. Google is just narrowing the list of “high-traffic” sites worth putting your ads on, to exclusively Google properties.
- cma 5y ago
  I'm fairly sure they block wikipedia on medical searches not due to accuracy, but due to drug ads on webmd etc. that use Google for ads.
  - lucasmullens 5y ago
    I tried 5 different diseases, 4 had wikipedia on the first page, 1 had it on the top of the second page. Do you mean blocking just that automated text result that appears on the top of the page for some questions? That would make sense, since they probably don't want to boldly state medical facts without context, especially since that feature can be wrong sometimes. Disclaimer: I work for Google, not on anything related
    - cma 5y ago
      No I meant the result itself, but I see it too now, I thought they were blocked altogether. I don't know if it is changed or it was always just never/rarely near the top (and maybe that legitimately organically happens). Searching 'ADHD' and Wikipedia's extensive page is midway down the second page of results. Drug ads for amphetamines from Google on 3 or 4 of the first page's results, but not the top few results (which are CDC, NHS, etc.).
- moate 5y ago

rawtxapp 5y ago

So are we trusting similarweb's data on Google itself? How trustworthy is it? How do they get their data? I've seen similarweb be off by magnitudes vs alexa for estimating traffic on some sites I own.

allochthon 5y ago

Often I'm looking for a Wikipedia page, and it seems that in the past year or so Wikipedia pages have been moved way down on the first page of search results, especially if the topic is a medical one.

prepend 5y ago
I noticed this too and now suffix any query that I think Wikipedia is best at with “wiki.” This is faster for me that opening Wikipedia and searching.
- cgriswald 5y ago
  I add “wiki” too, but I made it a keyword search command to use Wikipedia’s search and cut out the middleman altogether.
  - cruano 5y ago
    You can prefix your search with "!w" on DuckDuckGo, bangs[1] are a neat feature and what actually made me switch [1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang
    - gxqoz 5y ago
      This is effectively the same as the "wiki [query]" search shortcut you can add to a browser. This is useful, but there are also situations where I want to get to the search engine's results page but weighted towards the wiki content. Wikipedia search will always send you to the page for an exact match. There are times where I want to see the search results instead.
- georgiecasey 5y ago
  so do i, and you look at related searches and adding wiki is the top one. surely this is a signal to Google?
Robotbeat 5y ago

airhead969 5y ago

Don't ogle Google, https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com instead.

karlshea 5y ago
I use DDG as my default engine on my phone, and about 50% of the time I have to re-search on Google with g! because I'm not finding what I'm looking for. That's not to say the results on Google aren't getting worse, because they are, but DDG still has a long way to go.
ancarda 5y ago
Doesn't DDG do the same thing? DDG will show a snippet from Wikipedia, has a built in calculator, built in timer, and so on... Sure, Google also has a flight tracker widget, but it's not that much worse than DDG. If you really want no widgets or inline responses, https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ has that. EDIT: Startpage does have a time widget (search for "time in <some place>"), but doesn't have a calculator, timer, or literally anything else. How odd...
Demonsult 5y ago
I recently realized DuckDuckGo's !sp operator can give you Google results anonymously via Startpage.com "Startpage acts as an intermediary between you and Google, so your searches are completely private. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. Google never sees you and does not know who made the request; they only see Startpage."

croes 5y ago

At some point Google will overdo it and they will be split up.

moate 5y ago
I think that time was "a while ago" and they're still running because the US doesn't actually care that much about virtual monopolies.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  Since Regan, the US doesn't care about concentration of market power, only whether prices for consumers are affected. Since Google services are "free", no anti-trust violations are incurred under this standard. However, it's looking like things might be changing slightly. Biden appointed someone that cares about anti-trust. We'll have to see if that's just for show or not like most of his administration.
- croes 5y ago
  They are just very slow.
- angryasian 5y ago
  Monopolies are a barrier to entry. I don't think any of google's products prevent that. As we see in most technology over the last 20 years, the companies at the top can change fast. A company that creates a better search engine, will easily take over search. Next gen of search will be better at providing more relevant / less spam Youtube does have some network effect and high costs but not enough to stop anyone from competing and vc money evens out the costs. Next gen in video may offer more features, or for a completely different platform like VR The only platform I do see them having a strong ability to block out potential competition would be mobile and Android.
  - SomewhatLikely 5y ago
    Can you provide examples of better companies replacing the incumbent in a mature market? Most examples I can think of occurred in markets that were a tiny fraction of their mature size. Most of Google's users weren't using search engines when Google was created. Most of facebook's users weren't using social media when Facebook was created. In these cases it's less about converting existing users as it is about capturing new users.

jeffbee 5y ago

This "panel" must be highly biased, right? Only Google itself knows the real answer to this question. The data in the article comes from 100 million people dumb enough to infect their devices with malware.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
> Only Google itself knows the real answer to this question This alone should be setting off alarm bells for everyone, the government should be raiding Google offices to find the necessary facts to answer these questions. Google operates as the de facto front page of the Internet, the default starting point for the vast majority of the public, and they're incredibly dodgy about the real facts about how they use that power. It's incredible how often Google both states a "fact" that is extremely biased in their favor, and simultaneously suggest it's indisputable because only Google has data on it, and of course, Google will not share the data because it's confidential business information. This stonewall is behind incredible lies like the idea that targeted advertising increases revenue by 50%, despite independent data finding the difference closer to 4%. I think the issue at hand here, is that Google should be legally compelled to disclose the real answers to this question, and a lot of other questions about how their algorithms work. > The data in the article comes from 100 million people dumb enough to infect their devices with malware This is ironic, considering the Google Toolbar, headed by Sundar Pichai himself, is much of how Google got it's mass adaption as well as browsing data to improve their search rankings. Perhaps the difference between "malware" and "useful tool" is how successful the business behind it is. ;)
- shortstuffsushi 5y ago
  > the government should be raiding Google offices I can't get behind this. Suggesting that corporations be raided by the government is not a good idea. To my knowledge, Google has not denied any information requests they've received (or been subpoenaed for), and actively work with law enforcement in circumstances required of them. If we get to a point where they stand in contempt of court ordered information requests, perhaps this becomes appropriate, but let's not jump straight there because they're a big (huge) company. Many, if not most companies have private information that only they would know about their company and don't have the expectation of turning it over, I don't think scale changes that.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

Google results have gotten dramatically worse over this last decade. Google now seems to fixate on the most common terms in my query and returns the most generic results for my geographic area. And, it seems like quotes and the old google-fu techniques are just ignored or are no longer functional. There are a whole host of factors behind this, but I'm certain that the switch to Natural Language Processing / Semantic Search drove this decline.

dawnerd 5y ago
I was kinda thinking the same too until I went back and gave bing and DDG a shot and well, Google is still way better for my searches. I think its more of the seo spam that popping up thats making the results look less useful.
- bick_nyers 5y ago
  That would be an interesting problem, how do you algorithmically filter out SEO and focus on useful information? A signal vs. noise problem, but on human text, with the added challenge that the noise is trying to outsmart you. Maybe an adversarial ML network with an SEO-generating bot working against you?
  - Const-me 5y ago
    Technically, trivially simple: detect and penalize ads. You can even reuse an ad.blocker's database for the detection.
echelon 5y ago
My guess is that you're part of an unprofitable long tail. Why optimize for your use case when they can capture customers that bring more money with far less effort? I wager that most people don't perceive a decline in search results quality. At least not to an extent where they'd notice and switch to using Bing.
- yakubin 5y ago

latenightcoding 5y ago

Quoting part of a comment I posted on HN in 2018: "love monetizing niche search engines and other data products, but it looks like Google will eventually get into any industry where the main source of traffic is organic search, I wonder what is next."

boromi 5y ago

Google anything... more than half the page is irrelevant adds.

vishnumohandas 5y ago

On one hand I’m sad that Google as the Oracle is killing businesses and lives. On the other hand I’m excited about other portals that will open up. This just cannot be how things end.

thepete2 5y ago

That's definitely a tendency that you'd expect when sites are engineered for engagement and everybody starts out at google. I guess it also means google completely controls the experience of most people on the internet.

newsbinator 5y ago

2/3rds of my Google searches are: * current time [city] * [city] weather * [city] covid

gxqoz 5y ago
Are you like frequently traveling to different cities based on the covid level? Is your behavior somehow changing significantly due to slight differences in covid deaths in your city?
- newsbinator 5y ago
  Yes, correct

searchableguy 5y ago

Google provides instant answers for most medical queries, calculations, celebrities, sports, news, weather, how-tos, definitions, reviews, map, shopping, images, etc. Most people don't search outside of queries that google can answer from their own sources frequently so this seems plausible.

jfk13 5y ago
It provides instant answers, but in my experience they're frequently not the answer to what you actually asked, or they're just plain wrong. (YMMV: it depends on your specific searches, I'm sure.)
rchaud 5y ago
This type of "no-click search" is infuriating because of how often people take the snippet Google spits out at face value, without the context that a full article might have provided.
deckard1 5y ago
Those instant answer cards are often wrong. Perhaps more troubling are the instant answers Google gives you but you aren't aware they are wrong. It's the Gell-Mann Amnesia. Considering 2/3rd of searches end there, I wonder how many people are walking around with false information that Google fed them.

thomascgalvin 5y ago

If Google ever started including copy-pasteable code from Stack Overflow, I might never follow a link from Google again. Which I think says a lot about how Google is used now. I don't use Google to find web pages, I use it to find an answer to a pressing question. When I'm looking for something to read, I go to a content aggregator like HN or Reddit. Of course this isn't sustainable. If Google is just presenting other sites' data "for" them, and thus depriving them of traffic and revenue, eventually there won't be any incentive to create the content Google is scraping. Long term, this seems self-defeating for Google, just as its ruinous to the sites they scrape.

californical 5y ago
I don’t know about Google, but I’ve gotten relevant Stack Overflow code snippets pretty regularly from DDG
- buzzerbetrayed 5y ago
  But so few people use DDG. It probably isn’t much of an issue for stack overflow. If Google started doing that, my guess is that stack overflow would feel it.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    So, do you think it's fine that DDG is doing it? Is the act itself bad, or only the outcome it has due to Google's marketshare?
tasogare 5y ago
I don’t particularly like the press, but as a profession they recognized quickly the danger of Google displaying directly their content on the results page. Too bad they fought only for themselves and not for the web in general, since they’re holding enough power to tip the scale.
shadowgovt 5y ago
> eventually there won't be any incentive to create the content Google is scraping It's an interesting hypothesis, but it assumes the only reason people bother to seek and aggregate facts is to get paid (and the only way to get paid is click-through to ads). No doubt that early surfacing of data could disrupt payment-for-visit-dependent models, but that doesn't guarantee the data evaporates from Google's view or that new payment models don't arise to replace the old.

Robotbeat 5y ago

Half of my Googles are literally just using Google as a calculator.

allenu 5y ago
I used to do that until I realized on Mac, I can just cmd-spacebar to do Spotlight search and type my equation in there.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  I don’t have a Mac. Does Spotlight handle units as well as Google does? Also, doing the calculation in Google is handy because it’s easy to share in a modifiable way.
  - allenu 5y ago
    I don't know how well it handles units vs. Google but it does convert as you type, say "5inches" immediately shows it in cm but you can keep typing "5inches in m" and it'll do the math too.
  - adav 5y ago
    Spotlight handles the majority of unit conversions and quick calculations that Google can do. I think it is, or was, powered by Wolfram Alpha.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      Wolfram Alpha is pretty good and is more powerful than Google Calculator, but I’ve found Google Calculator to be more responsive and consistent and thus a bit easier for regular usage.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Graffur 5y ago
  Thanks for posting that. I never knew that. It does currency conversion too but unfortunately not crypto

criddell 5y ago

> the zero-click search problem is likely to rise even more I have a hard time seeing this as a problem.

phpnode 5y ago
As a user? sure. People who create and curate content quite often want to be paid for their work, they create businesses to support themselves, often in the form of a website. If Google scrapes and repackages that content, so the searcher never even visits the creator's site, what incentive does the creator have to continue making content freely available?
- criddell 5y ago
  The zero-click queries that I've done have been for fairly simple facts that I think most of us would agree should be zero-click. What are some examples that I could try that show results that you think should require me to click through?

bartread 5y ago

I suspect a bunch of people might jump on the bandwagon that this is Google repackaging others' content into search snippets and robbing their sites of traffic. No doubt there's some truth to that, but I'd like to indulge in a slightly different flavour of Google bashing on this occasion. The reason I often don't click through on search results is that the search results are garbage - either irrelevant or poor quality. I'm in the midst of refurbing and redecorating my house. Often I'll need to do some research on topics related to that, and when I do that I often find I need to refine my search query to find anything of relevance, even sometimes digging through several pages of results manually to find a really useful page. And then there's work: I still haven't found any answers on this, but one of the things that's on my mind about becoming a more senior business leader is that I feel like I'm changing as a person. I feel like the way I think about problems and people is changing. That's to some extent to be expected, but the issue is I'm feeling ambivalent about some of the changes I perceive. So it's about the effect that leadership has on the leader (selfish, I realise). But when I start searching around this topic, what does Google want to show me? Pages and pages of results about change management or, when it's being marginally less of a village idiot, pages and pages of results about leadership styles and changing leadership style. Neither of these is what I'm talking about. A human will understand that, but Google doesn't, and I'm finding that increasingly to be a problem when I'm looking for information: either, (i) my results are overwhelmed with low-grade spammy SEO'd to hell and back content, or (ii) Google's AI is too bloody stupid and pig-ignorant to understand what I'm talking about. Hence I don't click through on the search results the majority of the time.

jsight 5y ago
I'm seeing very similar issues. Google seems to heavily favor sending people to the sites with the highest content volume instead of the highest quality content. The worst thing is that content creators are manipulating this to build content farms full of low quality content and overwhelming ad volumes. I miss the old web where Google was really great at finding that one guy's blog post that was actually useful.
- judge2020 5y ago
  > instead of the highest quality content That's a tall order - Google doesn't know the quality of the content, only how popular it is. Right now it's based on data science pooled from existing search result clicks, but originally it was based on the amount of backlinks each site had - so instead of user viewership and satisfaction, it was dependant on the amount of nerds at the time who had already found the site/article useful. The internet has grown enough to mean that everyone else vastly outweighs nerds in terms of backlinks and clicks for any particular topic.

Robotbeat 5y ago

It’s not all bad. I consider it a feature that Google usually pulls the right information from Wikipedia. It doesn’t harm Wikipedia, which is free anyway, but reduces their bandwidth load.

panopticon 5y ago
That's not strictly true. Wikipedia is crowed-sourced, and losing visitors means losing potential contributors. You could probably make the case that someone who would rather read the snippet on Google isn't likely to contribute, but it likely has an effect on the margin. And that's ignoring the donate banner they throw up there from time to time.
- izacus 5y ago
  Google will start paying for that content though https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22334276/wikimedia-enterprise-api-service-big-tech-knowledge-boxes https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22334276/wikimedia-enterp...

MattGaiser 5y ago

Google provides tons of data itself. I search stock prices on it. No clicks there. I search weather on it. No click there. There are all sorts a little utilities that are now just part of Google.

Robotbeat 5y ago
Yup. Weather, stocks, various bits of statistical info like GDP and population, and image searches. Image searches are super awesome for learning some things in ways you didn’t expect.

lolive 5y ago

In 2014, the Google Knowledge Graph was a good way for Google to redirect Wikipedia page views to its own ecosystem. Good job Google! https://wikipediocracy.com/2014/01/06/googles-knowledge-graph-killing-wikipedia/ https://wikipediocracy.com/2014/01/06/googles-knowledge-grap...

prepend 5y ago
As long as they use the content appropriately that’s a good thing as it reduces web traffic to Wikipedia and saves them money. The purpose of Wikipedia is to improve human knowledge and all their content is CC so unless Google is altering content or biasing searches, sucking it into Knowledge graph seems like one of the main reasons Wikipedia started.

Mauricebranagh 5y ago

How much is this due to mobile search quite often I do a search with auto complete on my phone - then add a modifier to get the search you want.

sharkweek 5y ago

Many moons ago, I put a ton of work into a (now defunct) content site that provided specific information in a small vertical. Each post took hours, but I enjoyed writing the articles, and the revenue from the ads was enough to enjoy a little extra cash every month (we're talking just about enough to cover a car payment, for context). Google decided they liked a lot of the content and started providing it in their knowledge graph. It was initially great to be validated and the link to my content at the top of the search result was pretty cool to see. But it did tank traffic, as Google scraping my content and giving it away at the top of their search result page meant people didn't need to navigate to my site. Felt pretty terrible, if I'm being honest, but I also have always subscribed to understanding the risks for relying on other networks for my own benefit. BUT!!! As a regular user of search engines, I love getting the answer super fast without necessarily having to guess what sort of ad-trap I'll have to navigate to get the answer I'm looking for on some random content site. As a user, when I'm asking some non-critical question, it's nice to just get a snappy answer. I appreciate it. The problem of course arises when content creators stop making the content for Google to scrape and index, what then?

irrational 5y ago
Did they scrape your content and put it into their own database? That is, if you had deleted all of your content, would it still have appeared in the Google results?
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure Google is rather quick to delete dead listings, but their is a twilight period where pages persist in results. This is especially annoying with forums hosting dead and un-archived links.
  - joshspankit 5y ago
    I’m pretty sure Google actually deletes nothing. The original goal was to have all data digitized in 200 years. Of course, they remove things from results and from public view, but delete? I suspect no.

at-fates-hands 5y ago

I now use google as a last resort. I start on DDG or Bing and go from there. If those are dead ends, I will reluctantly use Google as a means of last resort. There are so many ads and now every time I search for something on Google, the first five results aren't even related to what I'm looking for. You search for "hifi headphones" and you get eight of the top ten searches are something like, "The top 10 hifi headphones." in an article from three or four years ago. Or "What you need to know about buying hifi headphones." informational articles. Not to mention the obligatory Amazon product link stuffing at the top of any product search results. Google's results are just so convoluted, its a real PIA to try and wade through everything they're advertising in order to get to an actual product or manufacturing website these days - I just gave up a few years ago. Too much advertising and not enough organic results to be useful anymore.

wnevets 5y ago

As a consumer I absolutely that google provides the answers I need without having to click on any sites.

davide_v 5y ago

It's actually something good (expecially for Google) since the information found is now usually in the results itself instead of inside a website. If you notice, in the last years, Google shows you lists extracted from articles, makes calculations directly, answer simple questions like age, shows a lot of Wikipedia info for any person/movie on the right, etc, etc. It's not because there is more ads or because the results are irrelevant, actually I'm never disappointed by the results.

AimForTheBushes 5y ago

I usually append 'reddit' to my google searches. It doesn't necessary provide better results but I love the plain text format.

truxten 5y ago

I wonder if you'll see more domain specific content aggregators/search engines pop up as people (like myself) because increasingly dissatisfied with the almost populist nature of a lot of Google's search results.

tyingq 5y ago

I wonder if an AMP click counts as a click or not.

Jerry2 5y ago

Anyone have any opinions on the state of image search? What do you use? I find Google Image search, which I used to love, filled with absolute garbage now. 90% of links are to Pinterest which greets you with usual overlays, signup modals etc. I use DDG's image search because I find Google's search unusable. Also, Yandex image search is probably the best reverse image search on the market. It's crazy how much better it is than Google.

kilroy123 5y ago
Yup I agree. It's surprisingly better.
colordrops 5y ago
It's not that google isn't capable of providing much better search. It's that they are driven by interests other than the users actually doing the search. Google has some of the most advanced tech and engineers in the world. But they also have an endless list of issues they must address - no facial recognition, no racial bias, no sexual content, filtering specific politics, supporting partners, etc.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  They also face huge amounts of legal pressure to make GI less useful and stripping out features so that more people follow through to the site and see the adverts.
diegocg 5y ago
Bing image search is much better too
- godshatter 5y ago
  !bi on DDG for me.
npteljes 5y ago
DDG is ridiculous with resolutions. Categorizes 500×900 resolution as "Large". Otherwise it works for me as an image search engine. I usually return to google if I absolutely can't find what I'm looking for - google is better when it has to guess, with instructions like "yellow blob old game".

deleted 5y ago

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ev1 5y ago

As a developer: This seems questionable. As a user: thank fuck i dont need to click through to those piece of shit sites that are nothing but spam and ad farms that front load fake description and title content

fractionalhare 5y ago

The author speculates that this is a direct side effect of Google searches being monetized by ads, and therefore targeting multiple searches. I don't think that's the case. I think this has more to do with the fact that Google now deliberately surfaces as much information - including summaries, answers, tools and widgets - in the search results page itself, which incentivizes searching without a subsequent click. Google very much wants you to end your search journey on google.com, but I think that's because they believe it will keep people coming back. I do not think Google directly tries to keep people searching for the same thing. This may still raise interesting antitrust concerns though.

sebringj 5y ago

I think this is mostly due to the immediate messaging they give on the topic that is sufficient and no further click is needed. Meaning the little drop down suggestions more often than not for me has the full content I want. For example, "What is the meaning of temporal?" or 'Who wrote "Wild Thing?"'. Google has inline calculators and an amazing array of usefulness without needing a website to go to in so many cases growing more and more. What is kind of sad/funny about this is its making the search results themselves less useful in which it was built on, giving less incentive to give this AI food.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

About a decade ago or so, I remember complaining about Google's search result quality having already declined then. Specifically, I think my complaint was that the search results were a lot higher quality in the mid-2000s, and then from then on, the search results ended up becoming progressively more sanitized and crafted. So, I mean, we're way, way past Google's heyday. It's not even close. But it's interesting to me that I can recall having those discussions that many years ago, and that people still complain about the same issue today. In fact, just about every other search engine is better in my opinion.

deleted 5y ago
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lmeyerov 5y ago

I googled for 'soc 2 multitenancy requirements' this morning then gave up and went to bing....

SomewhatLikely 5y ago

Article says clicks to other Google properties don't count as clicks. I would be curious how many searches end up in a click to YouTube. I know my fraction has gone up over time as it's more likely someone has put up a video about some finer point of one of my hobbies than it is they post a blog. At least in these cases the content creator can often still monetize these searches.

JasonFruit 5y ago

All of my Google searches have now ended. I use DuckDuckGo exclusively, and while there was a time when I used to add !g to about every tenth search, I have not felt that need more than about once a week for several months now. DuckDuckGo is simply enough improved, and Google enough worsened, that it's not worth it anymore. From my point of view, Google has blown the vast advantage they had, and is now second-best.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> 2/3rds of Google Searches Now End Without a Click Isn't that the whole point of Google providing it's own interpretation (sometimes several of them) of an answer to the search query ahead of the classic search results: give users what they are likely to be looking for without requiring another click? > zero-click search problem As a user, I see zero-click searches as a benefit, not a problem. It's a problem for people trying to use Google as a “clickstream” to waste my time and try to get a crack at my money, but then, that's exactly why it is a benefit to me.

kickopotomus 5y ago

Could someone here shed some light on the possible copyright implications of how Google now rips excerpts from web pages and displays them directly on the search results page? A cursory search shows that there have been a few lawsuits in the past[1][2] but they seem mostly related to the act of indexing/caching web pages and the display of thumbnails. However, Google's new method of extracting and displaying possible answers to queries from external sources instead of simply linking to those sources feels like it falls outside of the bounds of fair use. [1]: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33810.html https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33810.html [2]: https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/copyright-law/a-balanced-view-on-search-engine-liability-for-copyright-infringement.php#:~:text=The%20status%20of%20a%20search,unauthorized%20web%20pages%20and%20sites https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/copyright-law/a-b....

jccooper 5y ago
Most material they're scraping is copyrighted, and reproducing it without permissions would be prohibited save for the various "fair use" provisions. Google would probably make a "de minimis" defense of the practice. A previous case (Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation 2002) allowed thumbnails in search engines as fair use, but that's not quite the same. And current interpretation seems to be pretty restrictive on what's insignificant enough (witness various music sampling cases). And while any individual result may be small, doing so on an industrial scale is probably not "a trifle" and harm can probably be demonstrated. Ultimately, it would have to be tried to tell. They might also argue implied license. In cases like meta tags, that's probably reasonable. For straight-up scraping, it's more questionable.

MAXPOOL 5y ago

Search is the most important application of AI inside Google. It's the raison d'être for data collection. So why the search quality decreases? My current hypothesis is: Users who click ads and generate ad revenue like this garbage. Google learns to serve this outlier group of users. Killing the experience for everyone else is just a side effect.

superasn 5y ago

This is going to be happening more and more as technologies like GPT-3 get better and better. I remember seeing a demo which accurately answered a lot of search questions like who killed Mahatma gandhi, etc just using the GPT-3 model(1). I'm sure Google must have even better models than this and it only makes sense for them to answer the questions directly when there is sufficient confidence level. (1) https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060?lang=en https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060?l...

paulpauper 5y ago

google search results are nothing but content farms and other mostly useless shit unless you search for things that are STEM-related or academic-related.

scudd 5y ago

I admit I sometimes use google search as a spell check that's a simple Ctrl + T away. I'm not proud, but it's so simple to access when you're already in the browser.

rantwasp 5y ago

of course there is no click. a lot of search traffic is machines (machines don’t click) + a lot of the results come in on the SERP.

bob1029 5y ago

I think the issue here is really simple. Google has learned that it is more profitable to infer the intent of a query & tell people what to think up front based upon a carefully crafted set of advertiser criteria. It is difficult to appease your paying customers when you give the non-paying customers direct access to the most likely match for their query and allow them to draw their own conclusions from the information. Put differently, there is a conflict of interest inherent in the very nature of Google's business. It can only become a steeper death spiral from here if the motive continues to be profit above all else.

thrower123 5y ago

This is what Google has been trying to do, right? As they keep scraping more and more information out of the sites that they index and then provide thumbnail answers in the results page, there's no reason to click on anything. If I google for the weather in Chicago, I'm not going to click on a link to weather.com for it, because the seven day forecast is right there. If I google for information about a person, Google scrapes Wikipedia and puts that right in the results page sidebar. Flight information, bus schedules, anything that looks like a calculation, a whole bevy of other things, Google just preempts any results and shows inline at the top of the search page. Why would you click through to anything?

marcodiego 5y ago

Alternatives I've been using: searx[0] and millionshort[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searx [1] https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/

bordercases 5y ago
Thanks!

sinemetu11 5y ago

Do AMP clicks count as no click since the user didn't leave google? And how many are no click because google has presented semi-correct but not really correct information at the top of the results so the user finds what they think they're looking for without actually clicking? Seems like google is doing just fine so I'd imagine both of the above scenarios account for a significant portion.

Beached 5y ago

looking over the comments here, people seem to be assuming this is because of googles scraping and presenting of data on the search results page. but knowing my experiences with google search over the past few years, I immediately assumed this was because google search is getting worse and worse every day. after reading the article, the author doesn't correlate the findings with a cause, so who knows what the real reason for this is. but I know for me at least, it now takes me 3, 4 or 5 searches to find an abstract with something that looks even close. maybe I such at google searches, but after doing hundreds a day for over 12 years, I feel google search just got reaaaal shitty some time in the past few years. ddg use to not even be close to google in result quality, now, imo, they are on par with each other. and that is largely due to googles decline, ddg only got slightly better.

xnx 5y ago

This seems like very good progress. I'm continually impressed by how fast I can find the answers I'm looking for from Google. Google is working hard from being somewhere to get pointers to places that might contain the information you want to giving you the answers directly. Truly amazing.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

I'm confused by the top comment using this headline to complain about the quality of results. The quality of results is obviously irrelevant to the fact that most searches do not result in clicks. Google specifically tries to answer your question on the result page: "nifarious" - oh, it's spelled "nefarious" "1000 USD in CHF" - aha, about 1000 swiss francs 4 tablespoons in cups - 1/4 cup "how old is taylor swift" - 31 years; this shows up in the suggested search dropdown, so you don't even need to hit the result page

missedthecue 5y ago
This is what I was going to comment. Aside from all the tools like weather, converters, timers, etc..., google has even gotten good at pulling content out of articles so you don't need to click. It displays it in the search results. For instance, searching something like "what is the most common car color" shows me an exerpt of the answer from a article on automobilemag.com without having to click and read the whole thing. 5-7 years ago, I would've had to click and skim through an article. Moreover, Google compiles independent lists of their own. Searching "what animals mate for life" or "movies tomorrow cruise has been in" will pull up an interactive list. No click-through required.
hunter-2 5y ago
>The quality of results is obviously irrelevant to the fact that most searches do not result in clicks. Disagree. It's completely relevant. There are two reasons why people do not click on search results - either because they got the answer directly from the rich snippets (like you suggest), or because the results are so trash that you need to now perform another search to narrow the results further.

bttrfl 5y ago

If I were to build my own search engine: - I'd make sure that multipurpose sites get lower ranks, ecommerce with a blog would get worse rank than a stand alone blog or an ecommerce. this would eliminate all the content marketing and owners would have to focus on their core business - I would put a cap on amount of content that increases rank. A website with a million recipes harvested from other sites won't be better than a blog with 10 quality recipes. - I would downgrade rank for use of third-party cookies, invasive ads etc. - I would give users an option to "mute" a website - Randomise top results to make sure no one can "occupy" top spots.

danmg 5y ago

Most queries don't require further action. You can glean the information you were looking for from the results themselves. This is particularly true when you use google as a spell checker.

squarefoot 5y ago

Not going to change, since Google has become a huge advertising container with less and less value wrt genuine information about products. If I search for a product to buy, I usually add the "price" word to it so that the search engines includes shops selling that product. All fine, but if I want to read reviews (real ones, not the usual paid fakes) or blogs in which a product features, compatibility etc. are discussed, which is very common in IT hardware, I don't want Google to throw at me a pageful of its top sponsors. No thanks, I don't care, I'm perfectly able to find a place where to shop; what I want from a search engine depicting itself as intelligent is to know when I want technical information and stop defaulting nearly every damn result to a shop to buy from.

loopz 5y ago

Bogus metric when search results might contain enough answer to majority of sincere queries.

cambalache 5y ago

90% of my Google queries is "Search terms + Reddit".Usually I end up with better quality info. Reddit is missing a great opportunity there, especially because its search engine sucks (They should use algolia or something). If they were more visionary they could use their internal search as a starting point for a generic web searcher.

zuhayeer 5y ago

What's disappointing about this is how inaccurate some of the information is. For example, we even go the extra step of adding the OccupationSchema meta tag on Levels.fyi for salary data to be shown on queries. However, Google only uses the base salary component and not the total key, which highly misleads people into taking what's shown as 'per year' as the total compensation, especially since there isn't even a clarification for it on the salary cards. Still think it does make for a better user experience overall, just wish they'd add these details to some of these Search schemas they themselves adopted for the purpose of getting more pinpointed info.

vernie 5y ago

It's quite common for teenagers on TikTok to use a screenshot of the often-wrong snippet at the top of the Google results page as evidence in whatever crusade they're currently on.

oblib 5y ago

That doesn't surprise me. I look up answers to questions and definitions of words using google and seldom click through because I get what I need in the results. Not sure that's 2/3 of my usage of Google but that may not be far off.

gergi 5y ago

In the article, what does CTR stand for? Did miss it?

Siira 5y ago

I find this a very good result. It's especially good on bad network connections.

secondcoming 5y ago

I find myself going to page 2 more and more.

zupreme 5y ago

If the article mentioned the data having been filtered to not include automated queries I missed it. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of today’s Google searches are not being made by machines, scripts, etc. Desktop vs mobile was mentioned but that doesn’t necessarily prove that the traffic is “human”.

rongenre 5y ago

It would be great if a nonprofit decided to come up with its own internet index and duplicate the functionality of circa-2000 google. Imagine it could be done for under 10M?

rvba 5y ago

The worst is that Google doesnt care, since they dont fix old bugs, they only ship new products that fail.

TeeMassive 5y ago

Today I was working on an old project and I had to create a tfsignore file. I only got links to gitignore, even if I added 'TFS' as a keyword. In finally ended up directly searching SO and found the Microsoft documentation.

altspace 5y ago

A lot of time I get my answer in the “people also ask”section of the google search result. The section has exactly the paragraph with the relevant information. Maybe, search results are getting better?

RedComet 5y ago

Google search results have been pitiful the last few years.

emrah 5y ago

Google's zero-click answers are really good, especially if I search for a fact. While it's true that this is possibly killing sites by preventing traffic flow, it's one way to battle content padding for the sake of grabbing traffic. It might be an interesting move if Google were to pay a small fee to sites whose information was useful for a particular search, like those I chose to expand.

devops000 5y ago

The other 1/3 are bot clicks ads.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

They really should pay wikipedia.

zimpenfish 5y ago

Anecdata: I was searching for macOS stuff last week (trying to get something working because Big Sur has changed a bunch of stuff) and, most of the time, the top results where from 2011-15. Completely useless.

egberts 5y ago

Meanwhile, plugging in unfamiliar phone numbers no longer produces useful results at Google.com, as they WANT you to click in for more information.

forgotpwd16 5y ago

It should be noted that Google (applies to other search engines) searches aren't just web searches anymore. Rather Google is frequently used as knowledge engine similar to WolframAlpha albeit not in that level (yet). Specifically a click-less Google search can be: spell checking (term "wrng wrd") dictionary (term "define word") word translation (term "random in greek") calculator (term "1+1") unit conversion (term "1m in ft") weather (term "weather tokyo") sport scores (term "uefa scores", or ufc, nba, ...) map instructions (term "instructions to nearest city") For fun search any of the aforementioned terms alone (besides the first one) and with term mentioned in parentheses. Also lots of searches return card information (e.g. "spell checker" or "Issac Newton") or snippets which are seen when searching for instructions. That is when searching something encyclopedic where one-line summary or some simple instructions will suffice means someone will not go ahead and open Wikipedia or any other site.