Forum Moderators: open
I know Yahoo its doing something like this just by seeing that the address of the SERPS resuls are actually redirects to take note of the clicks.
Perhaps I'm wrong and Google is using cookies or something different for this? I'm just anoyed that there are website at number 1 position with only SPAM on them.
Google needs to improve SERP's as Yahoo is catching on and MS search will soon be here.
LinuxGuy
Just joking.
Fact is, I posted a message on the same topic today. And in their wisdom, the moderators decided to throw my mail in the garbage.
What I had said in the mail was, Google does track clicks. How? As they have such a large user base, they do not need to track everyone, a random sample would give them a fairly good idea of the same.
In fact, Googleguy has said it before in these forums that they do occasional click-tracking.
This is true - that is what my junked mail (thanks moderators) was about. In my machine at my workplace, for the last two days, every click I make is tracked. I was quite amused, as no other PC in the office was being tracked, even the ones with Google toolbar installed. But whenever I used a local Google such as co.in or co.uk, it went away and returned on every search with the Toolbar or google.com. If its still being tracked at work for me tomorrwo, it will be the third day.
I wanted to ask if anyone had seen such continuous tracking of anyones machine before.
Thanks to you, I get the opportunity now.
Thanks :)
I can assure you that Google does indeed track what is clicked. Take some time to dig through their SERP source code. I'm pretty sure if you do, you will see that you are being tracked.
With the toolbar google can exactly follow every click you make. Not only on the google homepage but on any homepage.
Another way google can track every move is by Opera browser since every URL will be sent to google to serve up the advertisements in the top right corner.
This information is from a much better value than clickthru from the SERPS since google can track if you read a page and click on information on that page or just close your browser window and click number 2 in the list.
<a href=http://url onmousedown="return clk 4,this)">text</a>
what google does with the info, we do not know at this time.
You might take a look at ask Jeeves (www.ask.com). They do exactly what you just mentioned.
But using clickthroughs to do ranking is a just plain bad plan and a major waste of resources.
First off, check your logs. The vast majority of searches are on terms that are rarely entered. Possibly only a couple of dozen times a month.
If you are going to base your ratings on how often a result is clicked, you need to have a sufficient sample size *in all possible searches* for it to be worth your time.
Here are some other issues with each of the suggestions:
click through rate - only tells you how appealing the blurb is. tells you nothing about the quality of the information.
Time spent at the site - I was looking for the altitude of mt. washington. I went to the official site from google and spent about 20 minutes looking for the information, and never found it. I clicked on another page and it was right there in an H1 at the top of the page. I had my anser in 3 seconds. Which page served me better?
Did they return to google afterwords? - When I am price shopping, I often go to additional sites after the one I eventually buy from. A also open a lot of the results in new tabs and just close the tabs if I am not interested. Once again, this sort of thing causes bad results.
And you absolutely cannot give a site credit on one search for how well it does in another search.
In fact, on a lot of searches, there is enough ambiguity in the search term that it would be best that google does not return only the most popular results.
So, while tracking users can give good feedback, it does not provide good fodder for generating search results.
Perhaps I'm wrong and Google is using cookies or something different for this? I'm just anoyed that there are website at number 1 position with only SPAM on them.Google needs to improve SERP's as Yahoo is catching on and MS search will soon be here.
linuxguy,
don't suppose ur getting beaten in the serps by spammy competitors are ya ;)
as for your other question, well methinks thats been answered, google DOES track behaviour.
Shak
One using their normal SERPs where as you guys say, it can be seen the source but not on mouseover.
Two - in an SERP url in the format of [google.com...]
Three - Opera browser tracking and toolbar tracking
But I still wonder why there are 2 kinds of SERP URL tracking?..... :-¦
