Google has won the search engine wars, but what Google shows people is not often based on what they are looking for; instead, it’s based on what Google wants you to see based on how much money they make. The more important news may be, however, is that organic search outperforms paid search.
Google prioritizing its own services in search results, by, for instance, answering a travel query with Quick Answers pulled from Google Places instead of from a richer, more social source such as Tripadvisor. It also shows products based on who pays Google the most money, not based on consumer reviews.
Google Search accounts for around eighty-five percent of the global search-engine market. It has made up so much of our online experience for so long that it can be hard to envision anything different. Today, the Google Search page looks essentially the same as it did when it first launched in 1998: blue links against a plain white background. From the beginning, the company’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page recognized the tension between helpful search results and profitable ones. “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users,” they wrote as Stanford students, in a 1998 pap r. Yet ads were introduced in 2000 and have increased ever since. Links to Web sites have fallen search-result pages, replaced by Google’s “Quick Answers,” which borrow bits of text from sites so that users don’t’ even need to click. Decades of search-engine optimization have resulted in content formulated not to inform readers but to rank prominently on Google pages. That might be one reason my toaster results felt so redundant: each site is attempting to solve the same algorithmic equation.
Gabriel Weinberg, the C.E.O. of the privacy-focused search engine company DuckDuckGo, cited sources of dissatisfaction with Google Search.
The first is the company’s practice of tracking user behavior, which drives the kind of creepy, chasing-you-around-the-Internet advertising that Google profi s from. Approximately 39% of worldwide eCommerce traffic comes from search – with 35% of traffic being organic and only 4% of it through paid sea ch ads. Organic search leads lose at a rate of 14.6%, compared to only 1.7% for outbound marketing leads.
The second is Google prioritizing its services in search results by, for instance, answering a travel query with Quick Answers pulled from Google Places instead of from a richer, more social source such as Tripadvisor.
Lastly, Weinberg argued, users are simply tired of Google’s dominance over their experience of the internet. Google is reportedly paying Apple upward of fifteen billion dollars a year to remain the default iPhone search engine. On Google’s own Android phone, changing one’s preferred search engine requires a cumbersome settings adjustment, and pop-up messages along the way urge the user to switch back to Google. “Most people have never chosen their search engine,” Wein erg said.
Approximately 39% of worldwide eCommerce traffic comes from search – with 35% of traffic being organic and only 4% of it through paid search ads. Organic search leads lose at a rate of 14.6%, compared to only 1.7% for outbound marketing leads.
Endpoint Digital
ORGANIC SEARCH STATISTICS
- Google processes approximately 70,000 search queries every second.
2. 53% of website traffic comes from organ c search.
3. Almost a third of consumers search for local businesses on a da ly ba is.
4. Over 99% of all searchers click on one of the links in the f first SERP
5. Organic search drives over ten times more website traffic than organic social media.
6. The first result on a Google SERP has a 28.5% click-through rate. By the time you get to the 10th result, the C.T.R. has fallen to 2.5%.
49% of marketers believe organic search is the most profitable channel they use.
There are alternatives, however..
DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t engage in any user tracking, has in the past year doubled both its estimated user count, from fifty million to a hundred million, and its search traffic, from 1.5 billion to three billion queries a month. Will they be able to ke p on growing? That depends on convenience.
Right now, it’s convenient to use Google in every device connected to the internet, but that may change as Congress begins to look at the power of monopolies of some platforms.
One thing is for sure. Too many marketers spend too much money on paid search instead of focusing on organic search.
