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'Google's No-Click Searches -- Good Or Evil?' (forbes.com) 53

Posted by EditorDavid from the I'm-feeling-lucky dept.
"That Google is the dominant force in web and mobile search won't surprise you," write a columnist at Forbes. "What might, though, is that roughly two thirds of the searches on Google never leave the search results page." That is, the searchers get what they are looking for without leaving Google. These are called "no-click" or "zero-click" searches. The percentages vary a bit depending on device, geography, and the precise definition of "no-click," but it's clear that Google is retaining a large share of searchers within its domain.

Search expert Rand Fishkin, who compiled much of this data, thinks that the percentage of no-click searches will continue to rise... Increasingly, Google tries to provide the information the searcher wants on the search results page. For example, if one clicks "weather" after typing "w," Google provides a large amount of weather data for the user's location at the top of the results: current conditions, plus hourly and daily forecasts. Most users probably find what they need without having to click through to weather.com, where the data is sourced...

A no-click result seems like a win for users, and it almost always is. The loser, if there is one, is the website where Google found the information. Users who might have lingered, consumed other content, subscribed, bought something, or created ad impressions now never get to the website... Google itself disputes that third party websites are being harmed as described by Fishkin. They note that many searches don't result in a click because the searcher refines their query or uses a link like "related searches." They also point out that users can interact with a business directly without having to click. For example, a customer who viewed the address and operating hours of a local business could visit that business despite the lack of a click.

Beyond effort-saving, an additional factor that ensures no-click searches are here to stay is the explosion in smart speaker use. If you ask your Google Assistant or Alexa a question, you don't want multiple options to get the information. You want the answer. I predict that Google will continue to use and expand its no-click results.

Absent legislative or regulatory intervention, they have no reason to impair their user experience.
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'Google's No-Click Searches -- Good Or Evil?' More

'Google's No-Click Searches -- Good Or Evil?'

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  • Nobody cares about Bing or the rest of them.

  • Thirty Trackers on Forbes.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by Frank Burly ( 4247955 ) on Sunday June 20, 2021 @04:50PM (#61504822)

    Privacy Badger blocked 30 potential trackers on the destination link. So if someone can get the relevant information without clicking, then they are better off. Not having read the article, I'm not sure why Google is singled out. I used Bing and DDG to search for Home Depo and got the store hours on the search page as well.

    What would be diabolical is if an engine delivered information so good, that you would have to click on an ad for something before you saw the results, or consolidated info, or whatever. It wouldn't surprise me if someone tried this back in 1999 (maybe in a P2P app).

  • Half the time a Google result is calculated (such as unit conversion), a statistics website which makes most of its money from subscriptions to data rather than web visitors, or direct from Wikipedia which received quite a healthy donation from Google.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Half the time a Google result is calculated (such as unit conversion), a statistics website which makes most of its money from subscriptions to data rather than web visitors, or direct from Wikipedia which received quite a healthy donation from Google.

      They're good and evil for different reasons.

      Good - if the user is looking up something common, like the population of a country, the weather forecast, or a simple arithmetic computation, then having Google just return the result is a major time saver and conve

  • Absent legislative or regulatory intervention, they have no reason to impair their user experience.

    Are we really soliciting "legislative intervention" to "impair their user experience"?

    • > Are we really soliciting "legislative intervention" to "impair their user experience"?

      Of course. 3,000 years ago we already had laws about lying, stealing, murder, etc. The stuff that most people would agree are good laws. There were ten laws. (Messianic law).

      Over the next 3,000 years, some other things came up. 200 years ago, we had a couple thousand laws - covering pretty much everything important. By 1950, there were nearly 1,000 pages of federal law.

      A few years ago, Congress tried to find out how

      • One of the Bible's major points is that whether it's 10 laws or 10,000 laws--laws, in and of themselves, do not make humanity better.

      • Of course. 3,000 years ago we already had laws about lying, stealing, murder, etc. The stuff that most people would agree are good laws. There were ten laws. (Messianic law).

        You mean Mosaic Law [wikipedia.org], not Messianic law (which isn't a thing). And there were far, far more than ten laws. You're referring to the ten commandments, obviously, but the Mosaic Law is a lot more than the ten commandments. It takes four books (Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers) to contain it all. The Mosaic Law includes:

        The Ten Commandments
        Moral laws - on murder, theft, honesty, adultery, etc.
        Social laws - on property, inheritance, marriage and divorce,
        Food laws - on what is clean and unclean,

      • I like how you went from "user experience" to the morals and laws of civilized society - as if they are equivalent.

  • Already a few people think Google,Twitter,Facebook etc. is what the internet means.

  • It's Rand Fishkin, founder of SEO company, Moz [moz.com]

  • People living in that atoll felled huge trees, made outrigger canoes out of them to fish in the lagoon. They also used the tree trunks as levers to move the huge head statues. Those trees take decades to mature. Their seeds germinate only after passing through the digestive tract of a local weasel. They hunted the weasel to extinction, the rats that came with them gnawed on the seeds. No new saplings grew, and no one noticed.

    One day all their trees were gone, no trees, no canoes, no fishing, the civiliza

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      But others depend on the data they collect to put food on their tables.

      And buggy whip makers relied on their jobs to put food on the table too. If their job is going extinct, that's on them. Time to retrain and go do something that society actually needs. I hear Taco Bell is hiring.

      • Their ability to earn a living is not the only issue here.

        When no one can earn a living by gathering information, where are you going to get your information? I am rich, I can pay for my information, can others pay? Will they pay? Then, why am I bothered by this development? Me and my children and grand children will have a distinct advantage over the unwashed ignorant masses right?

        But no matter how rich I am, all I have is one vote. When my legislators are elected by the unwashed ignorant masses, they

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )

          Their ability to earn a living is not the only issue here.

          When no one can earn a living by gathering information

          Care to make up your mind?

          I am rich, I can pay for my information, can others pay? Will they pay? Then, why am I bothered by this development? Me and my children and grand children will have a distinct advantage over the unwashed ignorant masses right?

          Then shouldn't you pay to support gathering this information you feel is important AND be glad it's easy to find on search sites like Google? Sounds to me like you want to be a rich leach, benefiting without contributing anything.

          But no matter how rich I am, all I have is one vote. When my legislators are elected by the unwashed ignorant masses, they will come after me, my family, my painstakingly accumulated wealth. It is in my personal self interest, as the one not in the top 0.5% but in the top 2 or 3% to have an educated, well informed citizenry for my country.

          Seems to me this is how it should work, no?

    • i have an idea. Maybe we should start paying 25c per search on internet search engines. That way they wouldn't have to sell ads.

  • Another possibility: new search (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Sunday June 20, 2021 @07:01PM (#61505088) Homepage

    Another possibility, and likely one in my experience, is that the user looked at the results, realized their search wasn't a good one and ran a new search with additional or different terms. Depending on the search it can take me half-a-dozen tries or more to get the right query.

    • Or get the statement that the results were removed due to DMCA claims.

    • Another possibility, and likely one in my experience, is that the user looked at the results, realized their search wasn't a good one and ran a new search with additional or different terms. Depending on the search it can take me half-a-dozen tries or more to get the right query.

      Except Google rarely gives results. It "interprets" the characters you type and gives out currently trending topics that are similar to your characters. If you want results you must specify an option such as site:****.tld or put words and phrases in "double quotes". And some sites are easier to search through Google than through their own internal search (which really means local indexing is crap).

  • Do my clicks count or not?

  • Then no-click searches are fine. If Google uses someone else's content, then they should share ad revenue, because there's essentially no moral difference between my building a permanent site showing another site's data and Google fabricating a per user page on the fly showing another site's data.
    • how about google and all other search engines stop selling ads altogether and start charging 25c per search and sharing that with "someone else"?
      • I could go for an option to opt in to add free searching for money, but I wouldn't want to pay $0.25 per search, since I probably do at least 10 searches a day. I thought Iota was supposed to be designed to help with microtransactions.

  • I often get exactly what I want from typing one word.

    Or typing in the name of the shop down the street to find out its opening hours.

  • The only true solution is that Google pays each source that appears in the search results page in a way similair as if the related link was clicked and the page was actually loaded. The amount payed can be related to the position in the search results.
  • If I ask for a definition, or a translation, most of the snippets appearing consist of some generic site description -- boilerplate, not including the answer. But generally there will be a couple actually providing the answer...in the first results page, or maybe the second. Thus no-click.

    That was with Google; currently I use duckduckgo or startpage, can't say whether it makes a no-click difference.

  • The data mining algorithms they use to interpret the information are surprisingly bad. For years, tungsten density returned a wrong result - or more precisely returned the density at liquid phase without any warning. It had been fixed now, but such goofs are all over the placeâ¦
    For the laughs, have a look at what is returned when searching for a funnel emoji:

    Is there a funnel Emoji? Indeed, Apples take is the only emoji to place the siphon, also known as the funnel, on the squids face, as reve
  • There are times I have another browser open (like ToR) and once I see the URL I manually type it in there. The site DOES get the traffic, just not going through Google.

  • I foresee a future class action against Google for this behaviour.

    First, I love the feature. It saves me minutes per search finding the answers I want without having to dig through a website to find the sound byte I am looking for.

    However, Google got in trouble from news publishers for not compensating them for the usage of their copy written material on the Google News Platform.

    What makes my website any different? If my website generates revenue from ads or subscriptions and I lose the revenue because Goog

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday June 21, 2021 @08:50AM (#61506396)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The thing where Google seems to give some sites direct API access, so if you search for certain things like IC numbers, datasheets, car parts, etc., the first page of hits is spam boilerplate text incorporating the exact search terms used ("We have BQ24193 DATASHEET PDF"), and then when you click on it, and get spammed with a page full of ads unless you have a Pihole and a script blocker, they don't have the thing you searched for?

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