Category: Data

Years ago, one might reasonably separate the elements of Google’s results into distinct entities: Google News, Books, Videos, Images, Local… But today it’s near-impossible. The list of elements Google might show for a given query are so vast and varied that at the macro-level there’s really only three kinds of search results that matter: 1) Google-owned properties and answers (where…

Yesterday, we explored how Google puts their own products before any others, often regardless of quality. When they do, *even* when those results are superb, it discourages competition. Why bother building something better if Google’s going to send 70, 80, 90%+ of the search traffic to their own property? Today, we’ll look at how Google uses another kind of dirty…

For the last few years, I’ve had a tongue-in-cheek phrase on my official bio that reads: “If you feed him great pasta or great whisky, he’ll give you the cheat code to rank #1 on Google.” It’s mostly there because I dislike standard, overly formal, professional bios. But… not infrequently… someone (often a podcast host or the emcee at an…

Last night, I got an email from Deren Baker, Jumpshot’s CEO, informing me that the business would be winding down at the behest of their parent company, Avast. If you support more competition on the web, greater transparency about what the tech giants are doing, and opportunity to hold the powerful to account, this is a dark day. Jumpshot provided…

In July and August of 2019, 1,589 web marketers completed an online questionnaire as part of SparkToro’s Google Ranking Factors Survey. The survey aggregated marketers’ perceptions of the ranking elements used by Google’s search engine. But… it also asked a set of questions around the level of trust in Google’s public statements. Those results are shared for the first time…

We’ve passed a milestone in Google’s evolution from search engine to walled-garden. In June of 2019, for the first time, a majority of all browser-based searches on Google.com resulted in zero-clicks. Throughout this post, I’ll be using numbers from the clickstream data company, Jumpshot. They are, in my opinion, the best, most reliable source of information on what happens inside…

In December of 2018, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was asked a set of questions by the United States Congress. His responses left… a lot… to be desired. Source: Google 12/11/2018 Congressional Hearing Notes Thankfully, when I told friends from clickstream data provider Jumpshot about this, they were able to send me numbers that give far better answers to Congress and…

In Europe, Google dominates the search landscape even more so than in the United States. In spite of the EU’s regulatory and hefty penalties on the search giant, and despite the anecdotally stronger desire I’ve heard from European consumers to have alternatives, Google runs Europe’s web landscape. Thanks to our friends at Jumpshot, whose clickstream panel covers billions of searches…

When Google’s search results look like this, content creators, web searchers, and Google all win. When they look like this (or this, or this, or this), it’s mostly just Google and searchers who benefit. Content creators? Not so much. Some clicks might still flow through to the folks who created the content Google’s scraping and re-publishing (ironically enough, something that…