Google’s New “Search Within A Site” Could Hurt Publisher Revenues
Earlier this week Search Engine Land highlighted what appeared to be a test whereby, for certain search queries, a search box would be returned on the main results page allowing further searches to made of the content of the site in questions. Well now this test seems to have been rolled out as a general update.
Above you can see what this looks like when you search for times on Google UK. If a search is then done using the indented box, it displays pages from the site in question - but on Google.
Google is, obviously, presenting this as something aimed at helping users (apparently lots of people search for the name of a site, and then carry out another search to find the particular content they’re after); what I wonder though is whether this has the potential to hurt publishers.
You see, when users come to a site and search for information on that site, it can do two things;
- Firstly it can generate revenue; if a site’s commercial model is based on CPM (where advertisers pay based on how many times the ad is ’seen’) then this would mean that ads are less likely to be served on search results pages within the site itself. Instead the search is done on Google which, of course, serves its own AdWords.
- It could starve publishers of valuable user data. One of the best sources of keyword research data is studying the words & phrases that users enter into internal search boxes. Now this data will reside with Google and, whilst it will be possible to find it if they do end up clicking through to a page (by checking the log files or analytics) it’s unlikely to be as comprehensive.
Now whilst I’m sure that this wasn’t the main thing on the minds of the engineers at Google (’do no evil’, remember?) it could be a very happy coincidence for their friends in the accounting department. After all, it follows on from similar announcements about Google ‘publishing’ content from major news agencies, as well as the rise in ‘blended’ search, which in many cases means users have no reason to click through to an actual site.
And in a week where Ask essentially admitted defeat and stated that it wasn’t going to compete against Google anymore, and industry insiders wondered whether Yahoo would make it to its 14th anniversary next year, all of this must help to soften the blow of earlier drops in share price.
Header image: jocke66 at Flickr
Hey Ciaran - not too different a bent from yours, but I looked at it as harm to brand search owners.
I see where you are coming from and I agree that it may hurt publishers. However, I also think that if the publishers had decent search engines built in their websites, then users would not need to go to google and search for stuff. Personally, it has been a long time since last time I used a website search engine unless it is for product search (and more ofthen than not, no even those t work too well). I use the site: command all the time and it works.
But of course Santi, you’re not a normal user!
I know from experience that thousands of people do use internal search engines (I used to dig through the queries for keyword data).
In fact I have seen a stat (which I now can not find for the life of me) which suggested that the number of searches on internal engines every day, was approximate to the number of searches on engines every week or month!
what I meant is that they have just put an easy non-geeky interface that enables the average Joe to do the same “advanced” queries that you and I use. Bad for the publishers, good for the user (funnily enough you do get good results using it).
Now, that the sum of the searches in all the trillions of websites with internal search engines adds up to the number of searches in the 4 main search engines tells you how bad those internal search engines are…
Santi - I’m sure that your English is slipping - I was trying to say that, despite what us search geeks might think, the number if searches on internal engines is waaaay more than all the engines combined.
Anyway, you know I’m right!