In 2020, Two Thirds of Google Searches Ended Without a Click (sparktoro.com) 89
AmiMoJo shares a report: In August of 2019, I published research from now-defunct clickstream data provider, Jumpshot, showing that 50.33% of all Google searches ended without a click to any web property in the results. Today, thanks to new data from SimilarWeb, I've got a substantive update to that analysis. From January to December, 2020, 64.82% of searches on Google (desktop and mobile combined) ended in the search results without clicking to another web property. That number is likely undercounting some mobile and nearly all voice searches, and thus it's probable that more than 2/3rds of all Google searches are what I've been calling "zero-click searches." Some folks have pointed out that "zero-click" is slightly misleading terminology, as a search ending with a click within the Google SERP itself (for example, clicking on the animal sounds here or clicking a phone number to dial a local business in the maps box) falls into this grouping. The terminology seems to have stuck, so instead I'm making the distinction clear.
[...] Here are the headline statistics from the data:
SimilarWeb analyzed ~5.1 trillion Google searches in 2020
These searches took place on the 100M+ panel of mobile and desktop devices from which SimilarWeb collects clickstream data
Of those 5.1T searches, 33.59% resulted in clicks on organic search results
1.59% resulted in clicks on paid search results
The remaining 64.82% completed a search without a direct, follow-up click to another web property
Searches resulting in a click are much higher on desktop devices (50.75% organic CTR, 2.78% paid CTR)
Zero-click searches are much higher on mobile devices (77.22%)
[...] Here are the headline statistics from the data:
SimilarWeb analyzed ~5.1 trillion Google searches in 2020
These searches took place on the 100M+ panel of mobile and desktop devices from which SimilarWeb collects clickstream data
Of those 5.1T searches, 33.59% resulted in clicks on organic search results
1.59% resulted in clicks on paid search results
The remaining 64.82% completed a search without a direct, follow-up click to another web property
Searches resulting in a click are much higher on desktop devices (50.75% organic CTR, 2.78% paid CTR)
Zero-click searches are much higher on mobile devices (77.22%)
Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure. Half the time you do a Google search you get so much advertising crap you have to add terms and search again.
Of course it's getting worse.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Informative)
But also for a lot of 'searches' you get the answer without having to click a link if you're just looking for the basic info (as well as links to search results if you need more) e.g.:
12 usd as gbp
population of france
weather in london
etc.
Re: Of course (Score:2)
Two of those examples could source from sites that don't care about traffic and may even be better off financially without it, like government websites.
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Yes, that's what I've noticed. I'll say that more than 2/3 of my google searches end with my seeing the information I want right in the search box, so I don't need to click any of the links.
Re:Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd argue the rest of us are using Google search much more than you are. There's a ton of stuff Google can answer right on the search page, so I use Google to get answers for far more things now than I used to. There's far less need to go to other sites.
Re: Of course (Score:1)
Even some more in-depth questions can be answered, when Google returns a snippet around the keywords in each link that matches your search terms, the more specific your search terms, the greater the likelihood your answer will be in the search results.
For example, search for a specific item to find its price, and if it's for sale, the price is right in the results.
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I'd argue the rest of us are using Google search much more than you are.
unlikely, at least in the past, maybe now that their results suck more sure. My job basically sees me using various searches all day in my IT job, whether that is to locate support articles and patches or troubleshooting. regardless I would potentially be doing hundred+ searches a day just in my job. I tend to use duckduckgo more now, bing when it is Microsoft docs related content I am hunting for. Amusingly enough often it is showing others how to find content they could not find themselves.
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Agreed. when I'm looking for in-depth information, I click a link. Probably several in fact, until I find the information I'm looking for. In fact it's not that uncommon to run 2-3 different searches before I get any results that look promising enough to click on.
But very often the information I'm looking for is something minor that ends up being included in the blurb.
I know various content sites will use these numbers to insist that Google pays them for the privilege of including them in their results,
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If you just need to confirm a detail that you're relatively sure about but want confirmed, then you only need the snippets. Want to confirm if the French Revolution was 1785, 1787, or 1789? Hey, guess what it says when you search for 'french revolution'.
If you're after something much more niche and in-depth, for example the solution to some tricky bit of programming you're working on, you don't go to Google at all - you go to the niche sites you already know from previous searches can help you, eg. StackOve
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(If you put "37+64" in the search, the top suggestion is "= 101"
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the reason is that Google is too good. It often gives you the answer you need, so there is no need to actually go to the source.
Google pulls snippets out of sites and displays them, and it's good at answering questions that way. If you want to know the date of some event, the MPG of a particular car, convert yards to metres, there's probably no need to actually click on any of the results.
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It would probably completely fund wikipedia if they were required to do so.
Wikipedia is already massively over-funded. They only spend about 2% of the funds they raise on actual Wikipedia operations. Seriously, look at their financials sometime. If they dropped their grant programs, etc., and just put all of their current assets into a trust, they could fund Wikipedia operations in perpetuity without ever requesting another penny from users.
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Are you sure about that? I would say that when the information is included in the burb, it is probably included in a large number of the result blurbs. Meaning the information is common knowledge and the market value approaches zero.
The blurbs are good for trivia - What's the escape velocity of Mars? Who won the 1987 World Series? The value is not in the information, but in locating it.
On the other hand if I want any sort of substantial information, the sort of thing that might actually be worth paying
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If it's included in the web page that Google links to, it's probably copyrighted. Google can 'summarize' if they want, and avoid the copyright violation.
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Copyright is not a brick wall - in the US at least, quoting a couple lines almost certainly falls under Fair Use.
You're right though - if they could accurately summarize or paraphrase they could completely sidestep the already minuscule legal issue. But do you think that would actually shut up the content companies? They're already looking to change the law anyway. Maybe we could get another attempt at a misbegotten explicit link tax?
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As for Wikipedia, where the blurbs are often useful and concise enough for you to have a good point - as I recall Google actually entered into a partnership with them several years ago as part of the oversized blurb they get. I forget the details - recurring funding? Discount hosting? It might even just be internal mirroring so that delivering the results costs Wikipedia nothing. Which would still be a pretty fair deal since Wikipedia doesn't actually provide any of the information - just a platform whe
Re: Of course (Score:2)
Wikipedia really doesn't need more funding, not only do they have plenty but the quality control is pretty bad.
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Too good? I find myself constantly resorting to Bing these days just to get a search that actually uses the terms I typed and not what big brother decided I meant, even when I explicitly wrap the search in quotes and even slap a -XYZ in there.
And that isn't even counting any time google decides to politicize their results, like when they chose to interfere in a US election and remove the single most searched candidate right after she utterly destroyed Kamala Harris' entire campaign in a single debate.
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Can you give some examples of searches that work better on Bing? I get consistently good, non-spammy results from Google.
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No, you get consistently ideologically pure results from google. There's a difference.
Try to find anything that goes against the established narrative and it's impossible. For example try to find the video interview of a gay asian journalist beaten until his brain hemorrhaged, where he's visibly struggling to speak so shortly after his severe beating, and it's right up top on Bing. Search for that on google and even if you explicitly try to force google to give you the result, knowing where and what it is a
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Or, i can't believe I forgot this example: During the height of the DNC primaries when she was the single most searched candidate on the internet google decided to completely un-person Tulsi Gabbard. Why? Because she had just singlehandedly ended the entire campaign of one of the pre-chosing favorites who is now our vice president.
Can't have a repeat of when Sanders managed to evade a media blackout against him. Or when 10,000 people organized against the corruption of the DNC and over half the delegates wa
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That is silly the obvious answer is google search is now failing fifty percent of the time, a new search needing to be done. Spammy search results is normally at fault but some users also struggle to do search, 50% of IQ below 100, they also struggle to get past spammy results. Clearly Google search is becoming shittier and shittier worse results requiring additional searches.
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Google pulls snippets out of sites and displays them, and it's good at answering questions that way.
I find that, about half the time, those snippets are wrong or wildly misleading. You should never, ever take those as the actual answer to the question you asked. They're probably the answer to something related to the question you asked, but not the exact thing.
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You forgot aliexpress!
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My, this comment seems to have brought out the "overrated" mod squad.
Is abusive Slashdot modding included in the SEO packages now?
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A benign search I did the other day had malware sites on the front page. Google needs to be held legally responsible for what they link to, those links are not user-submitted in any way so don't give me any bullshit about 230 or "it's hard to moderate", Google can and does and will continue to erase things they don't like.
Re: Of course (Score:1)
google going downhill (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:google going downhill (Score:5, Insightful)
A less cynical hypothesis is that the barely-on-topic results are the result of Google's various ML algorithms trying to infer or predict what you were trying to search for based on factors like location, what's currently trendy and what most people with similar terms tend to click on. If this is the case then it makes perfect sense that power-users, the technically oriented and the socially divergent are going to see Google's results decline in relevance over time. I know that I sure have.
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Diverge, definitely. That is after all the entire of a filter bubble - to try to provide results that are more likely to be what *you* are looking for, rather than what Average Joe would probably be looking for if he entered the same search terms.
The decline though - that's something else. Or I suppose it could just be a side effect of an over-enthusiastic filter bubble discarding the actual relevant information because this time you really weren't looking for something specific to your bubble.
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If this is the case then it makes perfect sense that power-users, the technically oriented and the socially divergent are going to see Google's results decline in relevance over time. I know that I sure have.
I think there's another aspect to this: Most "power users" use Google as a keyword search engine, but it stopped being that many years ago. Don't give Google keywords, give it natural language queries. You'll get much better results.
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That rapid increase is not surprising, google search has gotten really bad
Quite the opposite. Google search has gotten really good, so good that the answer you are looking for is usually presented in the search result without any need to click further. Search for a product, it automatically includes pictures, search for a stat you get the stat as an answer at the top, want some language help you get a dictionary result and definition, or even translate open automatically, search for a company then the phone number address and contact details are all displayed on screen.
I often th
Moving Goal Posts (Score:2)
great misunderstanding and missing context (Score:5, Insightful)
The story summary does not provide enough context and all the comments so far miss the point and say that this is somehow a failure on Google's part.
No, the point is that those searches presented the information the user was looking for, without them needing to click through to any other site.
e.g. try "sunset tonight" and find out what time the sunset is without having to click through to some other site
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It's also making a point that parts of the traditional news media is trying to make: Having significant parts of their articles quoted on google is not necessarily directing traffic towards their sites. And that's how you get even more click-bait shit.
Actually, I'd say it's the other way around. If your article is mostly minimal-new-content click-bait and buries the lede, forcing people to read ten pages just to get one tiny bit of new information, then your articles aren't necessarily adding significant value, and sooner or later, someone will extract that one piece of useful information and make it available in a less painful-to-digest form (whether that someone is Google or a competing news site), and then nobody is going to read your crap. In that
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And if users don't have to click, then he probably wasn't providing enough value to be worth paying for - there's probably five other results on the first page of results that contain the same information.
Seems to me the point of click bait is not to provide anything of value - but to lure people into clicking on things of no value. There are occasional exceptions, and I can see how some sites might resort to clickbait to compete - but it seems to me the fault lies in the sea of worthless click-bait, not i
Re:great misunderstanding and missing context (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think back to the early day of neumatic computing, that moved to resisters and punch cards.
You had better damn well check your punch card program works well before you run it, as turn around time and scheduling would be measured in days or weeks.
Then the days of networking, and how they've come to here with domain names, load balancing, NATs etc.
A simple internet search probably performs more calculations than the entirity of Appolo 11's mission.
Then I use the Google because a can't spell a basic word.
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Years ago Google said their goal was to be like the computer on Star Trek. Ask a natural language question, get a natural language answer. Then ask it a follow up question, or add specifics to the first one.
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Tearing this out of context, I'd answer with a question: Being fictional?
The computer on Star Trek also contained a lot of nonsense stuff, especially if you think about the Holodeck in TNG and VOY.
There it had to fill in all the gaps of a vague request to produce a very specific result, maybe here and there asking to be more specific. But in any way, it's a very iffy concept in itself. The computer would have to have intimate know
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I think they meant you could ask it "what is an NFT?" and get a response in plain English, and can ask follow up questions. The computer doesn't just pull snippets from Wikipedia, it actually understands NFTs and can explain them to you like a teacher would, or even work with you to speculate about potential uses.
Because Google is "stealing" content from sites. (Score:4, Insightful)
When I can get all of the important info from the #1 result because Google shows 75% of the page's info scraped for me, no need to click.
Calculator searches don't need clicking. (Score:2)
Searching "32 + 5" shows "37" on the result screen. Pretty high, too, IMS.
[Are we excluding | Can we exclude] those? That filtering might get weird, esp. considering "+" is a value indicator for the term that follows. I think. Been a while.
google great most the time (Score:1)
Many of the queries I do the answer is displayed with no need to click link. Google results much more useful than duckfuckgo or bing for me.
Re:google great most the time (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes because they scrape stuff from others and display it, getting the sweet advertising dollars for themselves, and ultimately making it less worthwhile for everyone else. If they succeed in their goal of keeping you in the ecosystem then the sources they use will vanish, leaving nothing for you and it will be much much worse.
It's a race to the bottom, don't take part.
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Nonsense, I have need for great search results and google delivers.
The sources are profitable and not going anywhere, you seem to be confused on the many possible ways a business can make money. You think click revenue, likes and views supports most business or is the major slice of economy? Nope. Sorry, the only race to the bottom is click and "impression" counting and ad linking, smarter people are blocking a lot of that shit as much as they can.
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Nonsense. You are part of the problem.
Doesn't matter what you think, there is no magic money tree. If those websites get no visitors, they will cease to exist.
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Right, if the Fermilab or CERN website gets no traffic, those national labs will cease to exist?
If General Motors website gets no traffic, it will cease to exist? If AMD website gets no traffic they'll cease to exist?
Hahaha, nope. Real business and real research don't get their money from click-through or "impressions" or linked adware. You seem to think the hopes and dreams of the "get rich quick" crowd filling their shitty web pages with 3rd party adds, or pimply faced youtube blogger hoping for lik
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The alternative to this apparently is to gate content behind a pay wall. At least that is what I am observing with a lot of the online versions if major news papers.
You want a quality article? Pay for it!
Only fair, right? After all that's how news papers have worked since forever, right? I would agree there.
However this also means th
In other words (Score:2)
Two-thirds of people using Google for searching have a PiHoie on their network. Booyah.
Decrease in relevancy (Score:2)
More than one explanation for what's happening (Score:2)
While a number of people here are rightly calling out "instant answers" as a reason why click-throughs aren't happening, I wonder how many aren't happening because the person simply modifies the query and tries again when they see that the initial results aren't what they wanted?
For simple queries, I already skip the search results page altogether. I instead use DuckDuckGo's !bang functionality to skip directly to Wikipedia (!w), Amazon (!a), Rotten Tomatoes (!rt), IMDB (!imdb), or whatever else. Why bother
1.59%: They need AdNauseum (Score:1)
I can't remember how AdNauseum works exactly, but it sure seems like it would help Google out to have more ads clicked. 1.59% seems like they need to get some VPs working harder.
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I'm actually surprised it's that high. When's the last time you looked at the ads when searching for something? If I'm not searching for something to buy something, the ads are just noise I ignore. Just like in a newspaper, really. I've got to be pretty bored, or the ad has to be pretty enticing, for me to pay any attention to it.
As a rule, ads provide negative value to readers - why would you expect anything more than a tiny sliver of click-through?
so which is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Half the replies is that google is presenting the information being sought directly, the other half that the search results are so bad people just try searching again.
So which is it? Or is it both?
My own experience is that it is both. A decent number of superficial fact queries get direct responses.
I do use currency conversion (400 USD in Euro), unit conversion queries (300 feet in meters); timezone lookups (current time in Frankfurt) and get the response back. I don't use google as a calculator; there's so many better options for that. And stuff like image search is also quite possibly primarily zero click; I at least often do not need to visit the website if i just wanted to find an image of something.
But i also find that when I'm actually searching for something, the results are garbage, and i can tell that without clicking -- is that because google is doing a really good job of showing me enough summary that i can tell without going on that its not what i want, or is it because google is doing a shitty job at returning results for what i do want; or is the world just so chock full of the same results scraped from site to site to site and SEO up onto the front page that I pine for a curated search engine and those AI search assistants i was promised 20 years ago that would work FOR US -- instead of the useless parasites we actually got that work for the tech companies and are actively hostile to us.
Either way, I just try again with a new set of search terms, and it frequently takes 5+ tries before i see a result that looks like it might be worth clicking on.
So does google have any good metrics on whether the zero-click results were so good people didn't need to click further vs so bad people didn't need to click futher. :) Or what the breakdown between them is?
Finally, I primarily use DDG now, but honestly when it fails me and i flip over to google, google only rarely does any better for me. So this all isn't even really a google specific observation; and I expect it's the same everywhere.. bing i guess is the other? it'll do conversions etc too. Yahoo search exists, but I haven't used yahoo search since ... lycos and altavista were mainstream... and excite? hotbot? or was it hotobot? I barely even remember.
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So which is it? Or is it both?
Depends on how much you hate Google and like to talk about it on Slashdot.
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I agree 100%. Google search has visibly deteriorated, but I am so used to using their automatic responses of what happens when I search for currency, calculations, actors etc, that when I switch to DDG I miss them dearly, and it may be a bit better, but not "google 15 years ago"-better unfortunately, so I am a bit torn.
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I have the same use pattern and use DDG as my primary/default search engine: I just add "!g" if I want to see Google's results. I add "!g" reflexively for the "zero click" type queries and "!b" for porn**.
**image search
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Either way, I just try again with a new set of search terms, and it frequently takes 5+ tries before i see a result that looks like it might be worth clicking on.
Your primary problem might be that you're using search terms. Google stopped being a keyword search engine many years ago. Try typing natural language queries instead. Seriously, just type your question. You'll get better results.
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I'm not really seeing it:
"how do i stop the intel optane memory pinning warnings" vs just "intel optane memory pinning"
Both give the same first page result; the zero-click response was very incomplete. (The correct answer is on the page: update the RST driver) DDG gave me the page result I wanted too.
Now an example of something that doesn't work:
Pretty much every search engine was useless at getting me the correct answer:
"Why isn't IAM Role Authorization for nodejs running in an EKS fargate pod working?"
L
Isnt that a good thing (Score:1)
What is google search? (Score:1)
How (Score:2)
The one third with clicks (Score:2)
The one third with clicks was language dictionary entries. Why?
> dog in slovenian
All results be like:
> en.pons.com translate dog
> Translate this page
> Look up the English to Slovenian translation of dog in the PONS online dictionary. Includes free vocabulary trainer, verb tables and pronunciation function.
Actively hides the fsckin one-word answer, while adding irrelevant blabbermouth (is there like a HTML tag that tells Google, put this in the preview and hide that from the preview?)
Users woul
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By all means create a website that contains translations with clear search snippets if you want, but don't expect anything e
Simple questions - instant answer (Score:2)
I use Google as a calculator, unit convertor, Metric/imperial convertor, and spelling checker, and single word or phrase translator
Most of these give me the answer directly, and the only websites it finds are ad-laden monstrosities
Google is doing it right
Tacking countermeasures (Score:2)
Can you even believe (Score:1)
Can you even believe people still search the internet with Google? If it weren't for the phone duopoly I would be off Google entirely. Use DuckDuckGo and Proton Mail.
So? (Score:2)
Google has improved search so that the answer you want is right there in the search results, not to mention search result noise, as others have, that forces you to first narrow the search.
Still more than the percentage of (Score:1)
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That's not surprising (Score:1)
When you google something it often pulls up relevant information and page snippets. That can be all they wanted.