This "article" is infuriating to me - and not because Google is planning big changes. We covered the Amit Singhal interview here on WebmasterWorld a month ago WHEN IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, see Google's Amit Singhal Interview: Developing The Knowledge Graph [webmasterworld.com]

The infuriating factors are:

1. If you directly link to the WSJ article, you cannot read it without subscribing (a paid subscription!) WSJ is in Google's "First Click Free" program, so if you come in from a click on a Google page (and now, apparently, a CNET page) you can bypass the subscription.

2. The article is presented as news when it is actually a month old - and the current article presents no new information, just guesswork. Well, we have our own thread going [webmasterworld.com] with our own guesswork. But this new direction for Google is a multi-year evolution, already underway.

3. CNET describes the Amit Singhal interview as something he conducted directly with the WSJ - and this is simply not true.

I say, read the original interview from February 13 [mashable.com] and don't let second-hand reporting tell you what to think.

No wonder I read the WSJ article and knew I had heard all about it somewhere already. That's big media for ya.

Well its new info to them and probably the majority of their readers whom they do a sterling job of serving, usually :)

Danny's Sullivans response to the WSJ article.

[searchengineland.com ]

Danny has a detailed rundown on SearchEngineLand that is very much along the lines of what tedster says. Must say when I read it myself, I'm like "what's new here?"

[searchengineland.com...]

(opps, someone slipped in ahead of me)

Interesting read. Thank you. Whats your take (belief) on this Tedster? Do you think it will hurt small publishers? Im not sure what to think either way except jumping to conclusions.

Pure guesswork here (very often an exercise in needlessly borrowing trouble.)

The original interview [webmasterworld.com] focused on straight factual information. Small publishers of that kind of content have already been hurt, except for a few who Google decided to trust (for now.)

Google may be moving toward collating content, understanding semantic relationships in more depth, and so on. But to do that they still need trusted original publishers. To survive, you'll need to be one of those.

So the best thing any small publisher can do, IMO, is put renewed emphasis on producing top quality, rather than somehow leveraging the production of other businesses or anything like that.

Thanks

The general trend is that Google is becoming less of a search engine and more of a publisher. So yet more proof that we need to diversify.

from danny sullivan's article...

How about extracting facts from pages, to figure out things like the inventor of the telephone or when a movie release will happen. Google touted doing all this using its Google Squared technology in 2010.

...it sounds like "google squared technology" is just a posh name for scraping

There is a tendency to talk about "surviving" Googles environment.

Perhaps one should be developing paths to customers that does not involve this, whatdya know, perhaps a spot of classical off line advertising

Another obvious question

Can the business model of all concerned survive the need pay for traffic(what isf we all stopped promoting just one company), the need to pay top dollar for content used(what if pay walls became the norm)?

An I mean all concerned

Rupert Murdoch called Google the biggest copyright infringer in the world. At that time I was thinking about YouTube. Sure, but now this!

Having the direct answer might prevent some searchers from clicking through to any of these. But with the answer already in some of the page descriptions, they probably weren’t clicking much already.

The above is from Danny's article. I think people may have clicked on the articles before Google put their best guess at the top of the page. If you need to source something, now rather than sourcing Wikipedia, you will source Google. What a coup for the Internet Giant!

Don't forget, Bing pays you to search on their service. I have made a little money (about $20) using their search in the past month. Not much, but Google never pays me to search, so I made an extra twenty bucks and got similar results.

And on the other side of things, a recent study looked at the average CTR for first page organic results. The result they found was 52% for Google and 26% for Bing. Even if there were some significant issues in the study's methodology, that is one massive difference. reference [slingshotseo.com]

Ted. So why is there a difference in the CTR? If I had to speculate... Google has more (perhaps better too) advertisers that will be seen on the first page. I bet there isn't a lot due to the ad positions. If that is the case, then perhaps Bing is a better place for advertisers to migrate to. CTR doesn't always equate to conversions.

@tedster very interesting study. I wonder if this is due to Google being more trusted. I have actually found Bing's results to be better in a lot of cases and have been resorting to using it more and more over the past few months because Google has been spitting out horrible junk, especially when trying to find information about specific (famous) people.

garyr_h, don't forget to sign up for their rewards. I don't know how much you search, but Bing will pay you. Also, they have webmaster tools too, but you have to sign up with LIVE.

@Dan01 I'm not in the US, so the rewards isn't available to me. It looks like the rewards are only for American stores anyway. And yeah, I already knew about the webmaster tools.

I am afraid to say that,for me, the value of any report is tightly bound up in its provenance,

Speaking of trust , that means do i trust the report writer, is their reputation familiar to me, do i believe they have sufficient access to the data they would need to produce said report, do they have the resourcs to conduct the said research

In this case, i am not certain that the questions are adequately answered

just an opinion

Dan01 wrote:
So why is there a difference in the CTR? If I had to speculate... Google has more (perhaps better too) advertisers that will be seen on the first page. I bet there isn't a lot due to the ad positions.

According to the summary, the study only measured the click-through rates for organic results.

scooterdude wrote:
In this case, i am not certain that the questions are adequately answered

Have you downloaded their whitepaper? I haven't, but it should give more information about their methodology so you can judge for yourself.

--
Ryan

I have to differ with their article on CTR, at least in my niche. MY CTR is higher with Bing and Yahoo compared to Google.

However, I am talking about adsense and my niches are in the financial sector. Also, I may have better targeted keywords in Bing searches.

However, I am talking about adsense...

But the study is talking about organic CTR over the entirety of page one. If ad CTR is higher on Bing, that would be consistent with organic CTR being lower.

Why would Google have a higher CTR on their organic results? I bet that will change after Google creates their best-guess results for queries.

a recent study looked at the average CTR for first page organic results. The result they found was 52% for Google and 26% for Bing

But that can be interpreted in any number of different ways.

#1 On any given google SERP, about half the listed pages are attractive enough to get a click; on an equivalent Bing page, only 1/4 of them are.

#2 Google's snippets provide less information than bing's, so google users are twice as likely to have to go to the page to find out if it's got what they're looking for.

#3 Bing's top-ranked pages are better, so the average user only has to try 2 or 3 out of 10 before finding what they want; a google user has to try an average of 5 out of 10 before they stop looking.

#4 et cetera.

Not much use having information if you don't know what it means.