December 2024 Google Search Observations

[Whitey]

Huge 48 hrs of overall site traffic doubling on only 3 url's, then back to zero. Top slot's since replaced with G overviews. For a moment I got excited. Looks like an AI smash and grab raid to me.

[edited by: not2easy at 11:38 am (utc) on Dec 1, 2024]
[edit reason] New month, new thread [/edit]

[universenet]

[ftc.gov ]

@EditorialGuy
Monopoly law is only for companies who has majority in some market, like google,
so they can be so powerfull that can kill all other competition, and competition can dissapppear

Up is link to US gov. Monopolization Defined and similar is in many countries

So, some activity other companies can do without problem but google can not do because google is in monopoly position, google has majority of market, and it is observed by regulators, similar is in phone providers market and many more market

[universenet]

@EditorialGuy
There is many things what many search engines can do and google can not do because
monopoly status, google is just under diferent law because his powerfull status on market so regulators try stop that kind of companies
Similar is in internet providers copanies, internet company what are monopoly in internet bussiness(in some countries) are under diferent law and can not do all what can do small companies, this is just way how regulators try control that small companies will not be totaly removed from market
Google even should not buy any comapny

[saladtosser]

Maybe the Aliens are coming because of AI?! Because it doesn't just pose a risk to all life on our planet but all life in the universe!?

Would be great to wake up one day and find out all the Googlers suddenly disappeared and were being anally probed off world!

[Marian97c]

Some Insights from Romania

Google is delivering a lot of international tech news websites in Google Discover, which drastically reduces traffic to local Romanian-language sites. This trend has been noticeable since August this year.

We are also observing that Google is delivering content in English and even in other languages through Google Search, including in incognito mode.

Previously, when we searched for a phone name, the first results came from Romanian-language websites. Now, we see a large number of "international" sites with content in English occupying the top positions.

I see this update as further emphasizing this issue, even though I expected the opposite—a fix for an unfortunate update. But it seems this is not the case.

I own two websites. One was penalized in September/October 2023 and has not recovered since then. Even news aggregators that steal our content rank ahead of us.

The second website is exclusively in the tech niche, and this update, along with previous ones since August, has greatly impacted me.

I have optimized the website very well. We use GeneratePress and LiteSpeed, we pass Web Vitals, the first ad appears after the second paragraph, and the third is at the end of the article. Therefore, we do not have issues with the experience we provide to our readers.

Unfortunately, Google is losing quality with each update, even for regular users who see a site in English, click on it, and have the browser automatically translate the content into Romanian.

I don’t think this is a good direction, and unfortunately, we cannot change anything.

Good luck with what you do, and I recommend you start looking for another job. In 2–3 years, all niches will be monopolized, and AI will provide users with all the information they need without them having to visit the original website.

[RedBar]

I suppose there's no need to say other than "As I expected" ... Traffic came to a screeching halt at UK 15.00 and dead ever since.

This has continued for me into Tuesday therefore I shall assume that barring core update Xmas Miracle that this traffic level will continue. As such not only have I stopped all work on this global site I have also stopped its conversion into a trade database.

Why? Quite simply this will cost me money and if all I am going to derive is little to zero traffic meanwhile AI bots scrape the site to feed their needs and sell relevant ads, well they can go forth and multiply themselves.

I am going to take all this information and images and create something else for my industry that I considered about 20 years ago. This is what happens G when you start pushing people to the edge, they will retaliate in the most unexpected of ways that you will have never, ever contemplated.

[gatormark]

And like I said earlier, Monopolies are not inherently bad.

I have used every ad publishing service under the sun over the past 20 years and Google has always been the best, by far.

While, I do not like all of their decision (especially recently) it is hard for me to be overly critical of a company that has paid my bills for the past 12 years.

[Dooku]

While, I do not like all of their decision (especially recently) it is hard for me to be overly critical of a company that has paid my bills for the past 12 years.

NO, NO, NO, Just NO! I have heard the above remark(or similar) so many times over the years from many people, it's just mind-boggling.

Gatormark, YOU PAID, your bills, not google. YOU created your website, YOU put in the work, YOU hosted that website, YOU put in the effort by whatever means to attract visitors to your website. You owe google NOTHING! Google just comes along with their bot and indexes your website.
If you, or anyone else did not create websites.....there would be NO search engine.....nada.

Google already makes money through their SE and advertising and believe me, they make money in many other ways you and I aren't even aware of.
If suddenly google decides your website isn't interesting enough than that is nothing more then the display of amoral greed at it's worst.
For google it's now not enough what they earn with their SE, but they want their greedy fingers in YOUR pocket in YOUR wallet and want a piece of your earnings also......and if it was up to them they would grab ALL of your earnings.

The latest end of year (very long) blog article from Ed Zitron describes exactly this. It is far worse then people can even imagine.

[ichthyous]

One thing we have learned from the past concerning monopolies is that when a monopoly is broken up it can often result in a worse situation for the consumer or business partner.

Have we? Not really...there are far more cases of government breaking up monopolies where the public benefited. That's why societies that aren't taken over completely by monopolies are more dynamic and faster growing. There are endless studies by economists showing how monopolies stunt growth in economies and deprive everyone of opportunities they could have had.

The question is how to define monopoly in the current age of tech behemoths. Yes we could all opt out of Google search and go elsewhere, or opt out of Facebook and Instagram, or shop online elsewhere other than Amazon....so it's hard to nail these tech companies as easily as past monopolies. But when one company has the power to suffocate millions of small businesses I would say that that power has now become a threat to the rest of the economy.

I, like you, have made a good living from Google organic search going back to 2003. I even built my mother a small website back then for her real estate business that ended up getting so much organic traffic and so many leads that she begged me to move down to where she lived to work with her ( I didn't do it). So I am grateful for the better days and am just riding this new monster until I feel satisfied I can close up shop. I won't be able to transition my business away from dependence on organic search, I have tried for years and the other options are too costly and ineffective (including paying Google for ads). I am not going to work to death to make no profit, and that's where this is all heading for the past 5+ years with Google...even longer actually. Google insists on having the entire pie now, there is no symbiotic relationship. That is a monopoly and it serves nobody's interest other than Google.

[EditorialGuy]

But when one company has the power to suffocate millions of small businesses I would say that that power has now become a threat to the rest of the economy.

If we're talking about Google Search (as we should be, given the topic of this forum), the tough part is finding a solution. Simply breaking up Google by forcing it to sell off ads or YouTube or whatever isn't going to solve the underlying problem: For better or worse, most searchers prefer Google--even when (to use one example) Microsoft Windows tries to force Bing down their throats.

[RedBar]

even when (to use one example) Microsoft Windows tries to force Bing down their throats.

I've just been setting-up a new Win 11 laptop this week and what an horrendous experience this has been deleting and opting-out of all the MS built-in garbage and to a lesser extent the Google stuff.

One of these days I will get around to Linux!

[gatormark]

@EditorialGuy

If we're talking about Google Search (as we should be, given the topic of this forum), the tough part is finding a solution. Simply breaking up Google by forcing it to sell off ads or YouTube or whatever isn't going to solve the underlying problem: For better or worse, most searchers prefer Google--even when (to use one example) Microsoft Windows tries to force Bing down their throats.

Beat me to it. Also, I was literally just about to mention Microsoft and Bing.

[christianz]

They only prefer Google because Bing is worse. However, during past 2 months gap has narrowed. Not because Bing has caught up - because November and December cores were garbage.

[gatormark]

@christianz

Bing is HORRENDOUS! Basically, unusable.

[ichthyous]

Simply breaking up Google by forcing it to sell off ads or YouTube or whatever isn't going to solve the underlying problem: For better or worse, most searchers prefer Google--even when (to use one example) Microsoft Windows tries to force Bing down their throats.

Agreed, but the fact that users prefer Google (and that Bing is a 2nd rate copy) doesn't mean that it's not a monopoly. The symbiotic relationship between webmasters (content providers) and Google has long been broken. The benefits accrue almost completely to one side now, and since Google has 90% of search market share it's hard to argue that these practices are not monopolistic. I do agree that severing Youtube is not going to change the problem of organic search. This is the entire problem of tech monopolies, it's difficult to find how to rein them in at all...they clearly keep growing and becoming more powerful by the day. They even have the power to warp our political system by flooding it with lobbyists and campaign contributions. They will do anything to preserve their position and weaken the ability of government to regulate them in any way...

[Whitey]

Unfortunately, Google is losing quality with each update, even for regular users who see a site in English, click on it, and have the browser automatically translate the content into Romanian.

@Marian97c - appreciate the observations from a Romanian language perspective. I don't know, but my sense tells me that Google is developing it's adaption to new and uncharted waters of AI related pivots, at lightening speed with consequential major quality issues along the way. Hence the accelerating frequency of the core updates and the mayhem for site owners not knowing where we're headed.

Aside from all the chatter here on this thread, about collateral damage, the impunity of Google's actions and raw emotions for those that are severely disrupted, I think it's helpful to focus on the trends that Google, in it's pursuit of "search quality", is trying to achieve.

What are these accelerating trends that it's locking into? What are we seeing?

I wonder if Google is going to accelerate it's use of browser related translations and AI in multi language in the SERP's, hence the EN results appearing. It would make sense, from a scaling point of view, if it works. The downside, is overall quality.

If you want to run with the beast, first try to understand it, if you need to co exist with it. I think we'll be more productive if we focus on this, but it's hard when folks are fighting for survival to see this. I get it.

[headspace]

The current evidence would seem to suggest that search is not going to get any worse than it already is as a result of AI.
The truth is that people do prefer instant answers to blue links. That is why the answer sites like quora, reddit et al
are thriving. G was using PAA etc long before AI came along, so the realisation about instant answers had already taken hold.
The difficulty for website owners, is that these instant answers need to be on the first page and therefore
traditional links are pushed further and further down the page. The good news is that AI will always need websites to draw
fresh content and training from. However, whether smaller websites will play any significant part in this new paradigm is the big question.
I suspect not. Some smaller websites that do not have dynamic content (information which needs to be updated every day and for which users
will seek out), need to find a new business model other than search to survive. Those smaller websites with dynamic content will need to learn a lesson
from the big news sites and switch to a subscription model.

[gatormark]

The sad and ironic thing about all of this is that, as a webmaster, I often stop at the AI results. So, I’m contributing to the problem.

[EditorialGuy]

The truth is that people do prefer instant answers to blue links.

That really depends on the query. Not all queries lend themselves to instant answers, just as not all queries on YouTube lend themselves to YouTube Shorts.

For example, if someone is searching on "how to replace a fuel injector in a Whatsitmobile," a paragraph of text isn't likely to be as helpful as a step-by-step guide.

Even something that might sound simple, like how to get from Widgetville Airport to the city center, may require more than "Take the number 6 bus" unless the searcher is already familiar with the airport, the transit system, and the city's geography. For the first-time visitor to Widgetville, an article with photos or videos may be much more useful than a quick AI answer or "People also ask" response.

It's also worth noting that Google itself benefits from a healthy Web ecosystem, because--as the dominant provider of Web ads--it earns revenue from those ads on third-party sites. In the third quarter of 2024 alone, it earned nearly as much from the "Google Network" as it did from YouTube.

[headspace]

Yes, I do also, as I suspect most users of search do. The direction of travel is definitely towards instant answers.

[headspace]

@editorialguy
All queries by nature prefer instant answers, although i do agree that the answer may not be instantly deliverable in an AI overview or PAA, but these are probably a very small percentage of the overall queries that G handles.

[EditorialGuy]

i do agree that the answer may not be instantly deliverable in an AI overview or PAA, but these are probably a very small percentage of the overall queries that G handles.

Maybe, but Wikipedia still gets billions of pageviews per month, so there must be plenty of Web users who want more than a quickie.

[EditorialGuy]

Something else to think about: If Google's AI is focused on instant answers, then wouldn't it make sense to be one of the resources that get cited for users who want more than the bare minimum of information? If Joe Searcher just wants to know the capital of North Dakota or needs a capsule summary of basic facts about this or that, there's no reason why Google would want to send Joe offsite. At the same time, you as a publisher will earn more from serious searchers who linger than you would from drive-by visitors, assuming that you're monetizing your content with ads, affiliate links. etc. IMO, that's a good reason to focus more on depth than on breadth.

(Note: I'm obviously talking from the perspective of an information publisher, not the owner of an e-commerce site.)

Also, while it's easy to get angry about AI being trained on existing Web site, is such AI training really any different than what we do when we gather facts from other Web sites, books, etc.? Facts aren't subject to copyright, and Google is as entitled to extract the capital of North Dakota from an "American State Capitalst" Web site as you and I might be.

[Treud]

I tried the search from ChatGPT to buy stuff, there are some good insights but it’s not as good as a traditional search engine for now.

For Google, after a few days of up (bot?) traffic from US seems to vanish yesterday, I wait my updated metric to see if the bot fest is done.

Anyway just middle of an update. And January Google is preparing something huge as well for AI search.

[gatormark]

@Dooku

NO, NO, NO, Just NO! I have heard the above remark(or similar) so many times over the years from many people, it's just mind-boggling.

Gatormark, YOU PAID, your bills, not google. YOU created your website, YOU put in the work, YOU hosted that website, YOU put in the effort by whatever means to attract visitors to your website. You owe google NOTHING!

If that is the case, and we owe Google nothing, then why are there so many people in here complaining about Google? If it was solely up to us, then Google would be irrelevant. We wouldn’t even be talking about Google.

If it is solely up to you, then you have nothing to worry about.

[headspace]

@editorialguy

Yes, I agree, there is a market for more than instant answers, and I'm probably splitting hairs when I say that queries require instant answers but enquiries don't.
Wikipedia in my view is not designed to provide instant answers to queries like quora, reddit, just answers, google et al
wikepedia is more like an encyclopedia which you consult to get a long detailed report from your enquiry.
It's not a direct competitor to search engines and I don't think anyone uses it as such.
Like you I run an informational site. My site as well as producing unique content aggregates data from other websites on the web.
This in my view is how the web was initially conceived, until people started to try and carve out their own individual fiefdoms.
AI has just brought us all back to that initial concept that what is on the web is a fragmented jigsaw puzzle of information which is free
for anyone to reassemble and share in any form they choose. copyright was never meant to restrict its application.

[carlhofelina]

Hello guys! What's the most effective marketing tactic?

[Conro]

@gatormark Did Google really pay your bills? What website does it have you know? Google is an index, it sent user traffic to your site to please users, so as to push them to use google again to find their advertising that you probably put on your site in exchange for a few coins. Now you are no longer useful to that index of the web called google because it takes your content and rewrites it with its spinner that it calls artificial intelligence. Basically, google continues to desperately need the work of websites to make money, then there are those like you who think google has paid your bills. Which then maybe is also true, if you have a spam site

[sk7411]

Can we get back onto sharing numbers guys ?

[daniel1213]

Low trafic today in Romania .... :-(

[Micha]

This update is funny: it completely reverses the ranking and seems to put an even stronger focus on big brands. My traffic: through search, it has levelled off, always around +/-100 difference per day but at a low level. Discover traffic comes back once a week. It's as if Google News only updates once a week.

The shop is dead, though, sales have completely collapsed, and that at peak season. Good work Google.