Submitted by “I was recently testing some of the keywords and positions for our help-desk app and it suddenly occurred to me that 80% of the page were not actually the search results. Check this out.” He has a very good point. Google has work to do here.
“I was recently testing some of the keywords and positions for our help-desk app and it suddenly occurred to me that 80% of the page were not actually the search results. Check this out.” He has a very good point. Google has work to do here.
I don’t see any of that crap, but to be fair I’m running Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus Element Hiding Helper, and NoScript. I see no ads toward the top or along the right side. Ah… the Web as it was meant to be, without distractions. Gotta love Adblock and NoScript.
Edited 2012-09-05 23:55 UTC
I’m surprised nobody has crapped their pants yet and gone on about how you’re so “selfish” for using ad-blockers.
Btw, I use all the same stuff.. Love not being constantly spammed with that garbage.
Me too… I was fully expecting it, as well as being down-modded to oblivion. I bet they’ll eventually arrive, though. Topics like these, about advertising and ad blocking, never fail to attract people who are for whatever reason completely against the concept of blocking nuisances including advertisements.
Edited 2012-09-06 08:59 UTC
Often blocking ads is not only about convenience, but also about security; most Joes and Janes do insist on keeping Flash installed so installing AdBlock for them gets rid of ads and at the same time drastically reduces the chances for them to receive a drive-by malware-injection via a vulnerability in Flash.
Sure, it is a loss in profits for the party that is running those ads, but the increase in security is significant enough to warrant that.
Yep. True. As yet another side effect, running NoScript drastically reduces the amount of memory wasted on unwanted garbage. Minimal or no javascript or any other scripting leads to much less memory consumed on stuff that would be better used on loading the actual pages you want to read. When you’ve got my problem (not enough memory for the number of tabs you typically have open), this can delay the inevitable swapping for a while. I noticed that many major news sites are bad for this, and of all the sites I visit Slashdot is probably the biggest offender… but it relies so much on javascript it’s not really a good idea to keep it disabled on that site. /. is the main exception I can think of.
Edited 2012-09-06 20:10 UTC
Same here – with the additional mixins of Ghostery to cut down on being tracked, and Certificate Patrol to keep and eye out for “funky stuff”.
Ah yes, and DnsCrypt – I’m not entirely sure if getting DNS from a for-profit .us company is better than the somewhat hypothetical risk of getting DNS poisoned/snooped, though
Well, with OpenDNS your DNS-packets do travel further, over more networks. So the chance of poisoning/spoofing increases. DNSCrypt does solve that.
Maybe you are not aware, but there is also DNSSEC.
DNSSEC is the only solution in the long run.
You should also look at DANE.
I agree – I see too many sites like any other adware sites.
Afterall they need money – they running the search service to show ads & make money. They are not running for free service.
With competition from Bing,Yahoo,…etc I think, the margin in ads are going down to make that up they are now showing more ads.
It would be great to see the comparison between Bing & Google for couple similar results.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=saas+help+desk
Look carefully at the images in the original article again…
I did the math. If you normalize to correct for the shady things the guy did ( the two images are of two different searches) the actual area used by advertising has dropped from the old layout to the new one (by approximately 3%).
He is right that the search results area is smaller, but the difference is 14% – not 35% as is implied in the article. But it has not been at the expense of showing more advertising – it is primarily the utility sidebar that has infringed on the search results area.
However, the biggest difference between the old layout and the new one is simply whitespace. The relative area consumed by wasted horizontal whitespace (using his images) has dropped by 30%.
Im not defending Google at all btw. If I thought the facts backed this guy up I would be the first to agree with him. But his implied conclusion is that Google is sacrificing search result area to show more ads – that is simply 100% categorically false.
Some people don’t like the utility sidebar, and that is an honest gripe – but that isn’t advertising…
The article includes whitespace, navigation elements and even the browser as “ADs”, that’s a very shifty move to artificially increase the supposedly-bad area.
The comparison with “old” Google proves the point, by including a big area of whitespace as part of the search results, and not showing the browser. And the search terms are different, so actual results are not compared for accuracy.
Also, the ads are usually relevant to your search, so don’t think they can simply be dismissed like random flashing ads next to unrelated web contents, e.g.: an airline ad above this very OSAlert article!
A more honest comparison would be:
– In old Google, without scrolling I can see 7 ranked results and 2 sponsored results.
– In recent Google, without scrolling I can see 5 ranked results and 3 sponsored results. But there are also navigation items, which can help me easily filter results by different criteria to quickly get better results.
So I don’t think Google has become as useless as the article implies. Maybe the article could have proved its point with less impact but more honesty; but how can I trust anything in there when I see such glaring spin?
I would go further than that… The article is downright deceitful. The author is completely making it up as he goes along and stacking his argument using totally misleading images.
There is no basis whatsoever for what he wrote – it is simply fiction.
The only significant difference between the “old” google layout and the new one is the utility links sidebar, which is variable width but appears to take up about 15% of the page vertically. That is arguably useful and is not advertising, but it does constitute “non-search” elements so Ill give him that one.
The rest? Purely contrived. The sponsored links sidebar and paids links at the top of the page are exactly the same as they always were – the only difference is where Google is choosing to pad things out with whitespace, which is neither search or non-search – it is simply whitespace…
As far as the number of ad items appearing above the results being different, that is a function of what is being searched for and always has been.
Why???? What is the point of writing this? Anyone can see the argument is totally flawed…
Edited 2012-09-06 03:17 UTC
Wow… I am used to being modded down for an unpopular comment on occasion, but that is usually on a personal opinion post….
Did some coward really just mod me down for posting facts??? A counter argument would be nice.
I for one, don’t like that they changed the search expressions, now try to infer the country and language for the searches based on your IP location and browser settings.
I need to keep telling Google not to do it, if I want to look what I search for.
Being a foreign in another country, while looking for information in multiple languages, this is a pain.
Yeah, that’s been bothering me a lot lately. I live in the French part of Switzerland and I speak French, but 99% of my web search are English queries related to technical stuff. I have my browser with English set as the primary language, an English OS. Jesus, I even have English set as my first language in my damn user account.
Yet, I get the fucking search results in French (they aren’t really good when doing an English query).
But it’s even worst than that. They have no coherence across their properties. The other day, I got the account settings page in German (I don’t speak German, but some parts of Switzerland do). And when I go on G+, it’s always in English. Seriously, how hard is it to just pick the language the user selects. I know better than some half-assed geographical based algorithm.
I totally agree.
Google must be very careful with your API, search engine and google.com site. The bing API is a lot better for developers (duckduckgo, for example) and Microsoft is improving the search engine a lot.
The google competitors are improving, and google is still better… but how many time?
My advice to google is remove a lot of unnecessary javascript, less tracking code and reduce Ads and the loading times.
I know… the business of google is Ads and user data, but if Google dont make usable and atractive your service, others can take your 1st possition as search engine.
Edited 2012-09-06 09:38 UTC
Blah, Bing is dumb. Its like when I told my girl (Who has an EVO) that I was getting her a Windows phone for XMas, first thing out her mouth was “A Windows phone? that sounds dumb.” LOL.
Take a try to https://duckduckgo.com
Not is Google, ok, but don’t works bad… and uses the bing api. Seriously, try it.
Ok, I am going to try it for the day and see how I like it. I think there is nothing wrong with the results that Bing gives back its self but:
The name is dumb.
And its actually too slick. Like with craigslist, I just want the info, I don’t care about all the fancy pictures and slick graphics.
But I am going to try duck duck and see how it goes.
+1
The bing name is veeery bad, maybe a product of a hard night of the marketing team. hehe.
Duckduckgo tuning (themes, settings):
https://duckduckgo.com/settings.html
And some spam:
https://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html
https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html
http://donttrack.us
So far so good. Will have to try more at home since my office does not allow us to change the default search provider.
Thanks for the info.
Google has mastered advertising without making users feel like they are bombing you with ads. I bet most people don’t even notice that they only get 18% of the page dedicated to the search you actually did. LOL.
I’m not using any ad blocker, script blocker.
http://imgur.com/qRXP6
Search for the term “Help desk” and put the screenshot again.
By the same criteria, a scroll of the page nets you 100% search.
This page is really interesting, it compares the search results of Bing vs Google.
http://www.bingiton.com/Landingpage.aspx?form=MBIOST&publ=TWITTER&c…
In my search queries Google won big time:
http://imagebin.org/227444
Edited 2012-09-06 18:08 UTC