Search engines, traffic eaters?

The "universal search" built up by Google, which consist to "cast" into the search engine's pages results information issued from diverse sources (daily news, images, videos, maps etc.), give us today a slight perception of the "portal strategy" employed by the American leader on his sites.

In fact, more and more, Google evolves from being a simple "hub" (a search engine served as an interface for the surfer who run a search and the Web pages providing the corresponding data) to become a "Web portal". Since long, Google has been for the users a quick point of access, through which traffic comes through, downloading a fraction of the webpages in a unified way, matching to the selected keywords, before being connected with the official Web site providing full information.

This time seems to gone by and it looks as though Google, in the eager to expand their services and to evolve, want to lenghten the time the websurfers stay on their results pages, on their site or, at the very most, on their multiple applications. No (more ?), today, to make the users slip away, he must at least stay in the Google Server domain, because of the high impact of advertising...

The universal search is a good example of this strategy system. Have a look at the page results powered by Google on a laptop screen for queries combined with a trade name and place (for example : "Hotel Washington", "Restaurant dallas", "Plumber New York"...):

What can you see ? Three sponsored links in the top ranking (pastel coloured frame assigned in the beginning of the list) ? powered by Google of course ? followed by a Map with links, the whole issued from Google Maps. On the right, 6 sponsored links ? still Google ? are displayed. The outcome ? Google everywhere... no much space for other results, except one with almost no visibility at the bottom of the screen, just "above the fold"... Of course, someone may object ? rightly - that on a bigger screen the organic search results (issued from indexes which provide links to competitors sites like yellowpages.com among others) will then appear on the screen.

That's for sure, but the real visible space, (the famous"Golden triangle") is globaly being occupied by affiliated sites and links issued from "The big Google family"....

By the way it have been noticed that the search engine currently tries to download longer descriptions of the webpages :

It's in the nature of things : If the description is longer, it contains more information and the user will not always have to go to the official site to collect the information required. Having it featured... He may stay with Google. It happens certainly very often: You run a search for a specific information (email address, telephone number or anything) and you find it directly in the snippet (a fraction of the webpage containing a short text matching with the keywords powered by Google). The result : A missing visitor for the official site hold by the search engine...

Besides, at this stage it's hard not to ask the question in legal terms: Does Google have the right to provide an information on the behalf of the official site, to which the websurfer should be directed if Google kept his initial function as a search engine? Well, if Google displays the information instead of only indicating the source, doesn't Google exceeds his rights, his duties and customary business?? The websurfers may take some advantage but not the websites... Must we mess up description meta tags just not to cast too accurate information which may result to webusers no longer need to visit the official sites? These are important questions that we should keep in mind in the future...

It's well known since long that search engines are great to boost traffic. It's obvious. But one might reasonably ask the question about traffic being hold by these instead of driving traffic to the sites. Currently, it may be a minor practice, but it's interesting to survey the evolving of this phenomenon in medium term...

Images sources: Wikipedia / TechCrunch

Friday, October 17, 2008

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