My brain got used to filtering the ads out, so it never popped into my head before... We are used to this picture. I actually had to get up from my laptop, grab a coffee and then glance back at my monitor from across the room to notice this.
ADs vs Results: area size
Now, we're all technical people so let's do the math:
- The screenshot above is 1280x960 pixels (a typical resolution for a 13" wide-screen laptop and some older 15"s). My Mac has a 1920x1200 resolution, but still I prefer not to browse in full screen (actually, the only apps I run full-screen are the development ones - Sublime Text, Visual Studio, XCode etc.).
- The search results take up 535x425 pixels.
- Which makes it 18.5% of the window
I do understand that this stuff is resolution-dependent, but still... Only 18.5% of the screen is devoted to something that people are actually looking for.
Let me show you what "18.5% of the screen" really looks like:
ADs vs Results: UI elements count
Now, enough with the area size. Let's count the links - the clickable text UI elements.
The page has about 45 different links in total. Only 5 of them are the actual search results (I do not count the "sitelinks" - the sub-links shown under some results and ADs). Which makes it about 11%. Only 11% of the total links on the page are the actual search results.
(If we do include the "sitelinks", it makes 57 links, 10 of which are the results, which is 17.6%).
OK, let's be fair, some of the links are the tools ("Google Docs", "Gmail"), some are search modifiers ("Search near...", "Search images"), some are Google-Account utilities ("Sign in", "Settings") so let's drop these links and buttons... Let's count only the "blue stuff". I.e. links that "look like" the search results, not including the "sitelinks". We have 18 links in total. 5 are the results. Which is 27%.
The bottom-line is: even dropping all the "secondary" UI-elements, the Ad/Results ratio is almost 4-to-1.
Was it always like this?
Unfortunately, I was unable to find a screenshot of Google's result page back from the late 90s, but found some stuff from the 2000s. I did an image search for "large" images, dated "before 2008", searching for "google results", "serp page" etc. Obviously, I was not able to find a screenshot for these particular keywords ("saas help desk"), so I tried to find a screen with as many ads as possible. Since "saas help desk" turns out to be a pretty competitive term. Here's what I found.
The AD/Results ratio is 8 links to 7. Which is 47% of the links are the actual results.
Now, the area. The results are 779x595 pixels. The total size is 1108x790 (which is even smaller than my original screenshot). Which makes it 53% of the screen is taken by the results, more than a half (actually, even more, since it's a smaller screenshot and there are no more ADs below the fold).
What does this mean?
Google has cut down the results area by three times - from 53% to 18%. The company is obviously interested in people clicking more ADs (in fact, I believe that's also the true reason behind "Penguin" and "Panda") since it's the company's primary source of income...
But all I know is that in the early 2000s Google has become the #1 search engine because of the three things:
- Relevant results
- The speed at which they were served
- The simplicity of the UI
57 comments:
But the results have gotten better over time. I only need space on the page to show me 5 results instead of 10 because it is so likely these days that what I am looking for is in the first 5.
Technically speaking, this percentage varies depending on the actual search query that is used.
As a developer you should use
https://duckduckgo.com/
As @BillHartzer pointed out, the percentages vary depending on the search query. People are increasingly allergic to ads (not just banners), as well. Organic searches still matter.
screen resolutions play a part. there are areas of the screen that are stretched and others with a max width. If I shrink a window the percentages are all out of whack.
Great article. Point of clarity is Google is #1 in the US. There are other search engines once you get outside of the US, which blow Google away in some countries.
There's also human factors - work from HP labs with eye-tracking systems from a few years ago showed that most readers scan around adverts - possibly why the author only noticed whilst it was difficult to read.
What are ADs? Are they like ads?
Tomorrow I'll use the same screenshots to write my article about how Google is 35% whitespace!
The next day I'll adjust my browser height to 20px and show how they have ZERO links above the fold.
Then, I might stop wasting quite as much of my users time and do some meaningful research.
@Examancer You can also notice that leaving the room decreases links visibility by 100%. And this phenomenon is independent from screen resolution.
I agree that Google has a problem with ad creep, but I can't help but see problems with your formula:
1) Google is (as is any other website) more than just the part you see "above the fold" when you first load the page. People scroll, and you should take into account the rest of the page.
2) Your formula implies that browser chrome, page chrome, and white space in the page design is all usable space. Putting aside the problems with just counting the "above the fold" area, I redrew your boxes and came up with 41% of the usable area being search results:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1690531/files/google_screen_area.png
27% is not almost a ratio of 4 to 1 it's almost 3 to 1.
I'm working on a better search UI, you can follow me on twitter @DevinRhode2 to get updates, no further comment though.
Nice post! Your readers are a bunch of Google fanboys. It's going to take a while till the public is willing to accept that Google might have themselves at their number one interest. Gasp!
Try duckduckgo.com. Plus, the anon guy who said his results are better over time w/Google forgot to include that he is being *tracked*. He also forgot to add that over time people become better users of search engines.
So I'm poking at these numbers and I think you missed a few things, so I took your screenshot and did my own boxes.
The title, nav and scroll bars of your browser don't count, so lets throw those out.
That gives us 1122942 pixels of actual page content (1266x887).
Google does have a fair bit of white-space but we'll count the top three bars as the header, including the nav links, logo, search bar, settings and log in buttons, and results count. That comes out to 1266x161, or 203826 pixels.
The left side bar has a bit of white-space in it too, but measuring to the width of the horizontal lines in that space, we get 202x728, or 147056 pixels.
The ad boxes get an 8 pixel border around them and come up to 556x272 (151232 pixels) and 237x709 (168033) for a total of 319265 pixels.
Finally the search results, also getting an 8 pixel border, get 566x422 (238852 pixels).
This leaves 213943 pixels of unaccounted white space.
The search results are 21.27% of the entire page, 30.93% of the main frame space (including white-space), or 42.79% of "results and ads" space.
http://imgur.com/nIHob Here is my measuring work.
I did a similar analysis back in 2005 - back then, Google was over 50% search results and the competitors stacked up closer to 18%. See here:
http://startupboy.com/2005/12/20/fix-the-search-interface-first/
I want to love duckduckgo, but it's slow and (worse) the results are usually much staler than Google's.
re: harbud, I really haven't noticed ddg being that slow that it significantly effected me. But as well, the !bang syntax is invaluable. Yea, you could make a shortcut for each of these things, but even if you did there are so many that it accounts for ones you may need in the future. I think that makes it worth it even if you're just using it to redirect you directly to !perldoc or whatnot.
Adblock Plus for Firefox will remove every text ad from a Google search result. Make sure to uncheck "allow non-intrusive advertising".
To make a fair comparison, you should use the same browser size as your historic screenshot. Most good websites fill big browser windows with space - including this blog.
Nobody reads advertising. People read what they want to read, and sometimes it's an ad.
── Howard Luck Gossage
As an adblock user, I never noticed.
Adblock
...the true reason behind "Penguin" and "Panda"...
can you elaborate?
You are right!
But on the other hand, Google still provide more relevant results than other search engines! and this why majority of us don't pay attention to the facts that you explored.
As long as most people are using google they are right. If google goes a wrong way their market share will decline. There are enough competitors with good alternatives like bing. That's how markets work.
I disagree on several fronts of your conclusion.
A) I tried to get google show me ads by googling couple of different key words expecting lots of ads. ZERO ads after couple of searches.
B) Besides results and ads there are actual UI elements that either I use or I have seen heavy use by others, different people use different one of them, but not having the one they use would waste lot of time.
C) The height of screen changes percentages heavily between those three elements.
D) Its not really that uncommon for me to find the information I search better from ads than the results.
E) Widening the results makes them harder to read them fast, so wider screen shouldn't really mean much wider results.
So in overall they added a left hand toolbar since screens are wider than before. They kept their right hand advertisement bar at constant width but got more adverts in it to spend area that they didn't use before hand. And for the central ads, they might have increased but with reasonably large monitors they are not a problem, and more than often they are the real results I wanted when there are more than few of them.
I don't get why you are counting the Google UI Elements as "Ads", honestly WTF?
All the access to the different search results, all the google tools, the search bar, these are not "Ads". This is a pure lame title made for link and tweet bait.
Love it.
This sort of thing will eventually be Google's downfall.
It's a shame DuckDuckGo is so backwards in terms of algo and Bing is just crap & 1999, otherwise we'd see some nice competition!
Good post anyway, it's hard to notice when you're working day to day on this screen.
Matt
Hello Everyone!
It's a nice post!
Could anybody show me relevant statistics about the differences between SERP and ads' CTR accurancy?
It's a really actual topic for me as well!
Thanks a lot!
Mate I increased this ratio by almost 2.5 by installing adblock...
If you want to get ride of intrusive ad, you can.
Aymeric
google start loose their touch after they get listed and went public.
you are correct, but I not think what this articles will change anything. Big Google already gets big $$$ and unlikely will change anything. Coming soon more ads, more black & white sites penalization, more strict G 'antispam' solutions and only wikipedia and webmd in google search results (1-3 organic results only). Because no more ways to increase revenue for them now.
What do you make of this? What are the percentage of organics?
http://www.google.com/search?q=really+obscure+long+tail+search+query
or these?:
http://www.google.com/search?q=history+of+coffee
http://www.google.com/search?q=bill+of+rights
http://www.google.com/search?q=pictures
http://www.google.com/search?q=water
You can't take one random sample out of context and prove a point. A "free" service can't remain free forever. If you don't like what Google has become, then switch. Your arguments don't make sense. Your math doesn't add up.
Oh Lucy, you have some 'spainin' to do!
In the past screens were smaller.
I also got less ads on the page for "open source social networking" than I did from the screenshot used as your comparison. What does it all mean? Maybe a bit more rigor with the analysis is in order.
If the first three results give you what you want, a small area is fine by me. When I start flipping through pages, though, I'd like to use my screen estate. //volley
The result is depended on the keywords that we search, if we search for most competitive keywords, the sponsor ads will show more. I have to check for my website keywords, while searching no ads been listed on SERP.
But Google giving better results to Users. This is the main reason for Google reducing the Search Results.
i use adblock plus
Interesting post, but when you say 18.5% of your page are "something people are looking for", you imply that the remainder is irrelevant revenue generators for Google.
But your own screenshots tell a different story. I see a lot of whitespace (important for pleasant use of any document - compare to the crowded "old" layout!), page navigation, OS controls such as the title bar, etc.
If you want to fault Google for too many ads, shouldn't you have compared the screen actually used for ads to the rest of the space?
Lots more analysis is in order.
Screens were smaller before and the total resolution on graphics cards were much less, as well. That factors quite a deal into the change. Look at tablet screenshots and how they use the limited real estate.
"Something people are looking for" is a very subjective statement.
Panda was a knee-jerk reaction to Blekko's blacklists. Penguin was to prevent people from using bad backlinks to increase their rankings. WTF are you talking about?
Interestingly, a google search for 18% search had neither ads nor left sidebar, even though these appear for any other search term.
Hi,
1- ORGANIC VS PAID
It has been noticed that after most recent updates from google, search results are displaying less relevant results against search queries specially between August and September. Now and i myself practically test it on google and doing research for almost 35 different niche and business websites of mine for last 15 days and concluded that google search results are less efficient than ever before and even not relevant or i would like to say wrong gainst the words you are typing in google search box.
Simply, they love to have paid ads to display better and relevant search results rather than organic search results. I am dam 101% sure there is a new strategy.
If someone is interested PM me i can show you proof that google is displaying less relevant and efficient results after recent google updates. Same search i run on bing and yahoo and found that their efficiency and relevancy is better than google at the moment.
2- PENGUIN UPDATE AUGUST 2012 ( AS PER MY RESEARCH )
Specially, google's last penguin update in august which only deal with keyword stuffing and penalize websites and pages on the basis of keyword stuffing. In march i developed one of my micro niche website of 3 articles of 400 words and in May i got #1 position on the google without having a single backlink, yes very true without having a single backlink pointing to my niche website i got Rank #1 against my main theme keyword and it remains rank #1 till August 28th.
Then during the month of august i put 4 more articles targeting few keywords within same niche, because i was greedy to rank those new keywords on the top as well it was my mistake actually and google considered my website keyword stuffed, penalize me badly and put me no where on search results because of keyword stuffing.
3- RECOVERY FROM PENGUIN
I did analysis and found that there was no single backlink pointing to my website and it was only because of keyword stuffing and same happend to my other 13 niche websites as well, i recovered it by removing extra articles from website as well as from sitemaps and fixing over optimization, now google starting recovering my penalized websites and i can see on search results but still on 10th 7th and 5th pages.
4- NICHE WEBSITE BUSINESS AND GOOGLE TREATMENT
I own 127 niche websites and few corporate business websites(13 have been penalized by august penguin update) and found that google love micro niche websites having 2 to 3 articles per website and they love to rank micro niche websites targeting single or two keywords per domain without keyword stuffing :), over optimization and without having too many backlinks.
My remaining websites are still with good rankings because i never did keyword stuffing and over optimize title and description tags on these websites. So on my personal experience i can suggest people to never do keyword stuffing, over optimization title and description tags.
As per my understanding and research micro niche websites are successful and in the benifit of you and google as well, yes right in the benefit of google :) why?
Simply, because they have accurate, exact, targeted, relevant, data in their huge database against respective keywords and they can easily decide what to display under paid ads and what to display under organic search results.
Still, i love google because audience is there but i might switch to bing for googling :) to get relevancy search results, i found bing is displaying more relevant search results.
I hope all the info would help you and need your advise and correction if i am wrong somewhere in the whole discussion.
Not a problem if you're using an ad blocker. I totally forgot Google even HAD ads on their search results pages since I've been using ad blockers for so long.
Ad blocker is great. Even Google Chrome has one :)
Ge I do love it when people do "analysis"
Reminds me of those documentaries that prove the shroud of turin or that aliens crashed here.
----------
They are the results page for a reason the result of the algo and its many family members.
The problem is simple... not enough competition. over analysing penalty algo's are not going to help you.
Lack of competative online realestate in serp creates higher demand on google.
the world is going back to the 20's during the first depression where there is not enough competition this will make our system fail again. Shame really i liked healthy competition :(
Competition breeds innovation and that is so being killed by our copyright and IP laws.
I challenge the google founders to relese in part the algo to creative commons and once again challenge themselves again like they did in the 90's with a nice competative market and wholesome version of capatalism.
Kramer8u
I did 10 random searches and I didn't get any ads at all!
It is getting more and more crowded on the results pages.
Very interesting find!
Since I've got a pretty big screen (23") I didn't realize the changes. I do still remember the search results pages from the 2000s: Fast, clean, to the point. Ah, I miss the old and awkward Google :-)
This is bound to occur.
There are many services provided by google which are free and make our life easy.
So to compensate, these things will occur.
You would like to give spin to http://www.shopatsite.com
your analysis is quite accurate but from a point of view, firstly if you enter any keyword in search engine box what follows next would be considered as a result whether it be a paid or seo results is secondary
to directly quote you
"Google has cut down the results area by three times - from 53% to 18%. The company is obviously interested in people clicking more ADs"
Google has worked very hard on their entire ads system so it would be wrong to say that people are not getting the actual results when they are searching for something. clicking on a relevant ad is much better that searching through pages of worthless information, and TBH seo gigs are much bigger and nastier than that of adwords so the chances of actually getting relevant/good/true information about a product in free results will be pretty slim in case we are talking about something popular
another thing to notice is you eventually see most ads for the most common/used/popular/new/buzz products. consider the following keyword
wordpress magic
the reason of this keyword might be a simple idea that the person will either
1) be intrigued by the power of wordpress
2) maybe searching for a software?
3) knows for sure that wordpress helps in ranking and should join the bandwagon
4) just doing a random search to see what pops ;)
if you indeed do the search you will be amazed by the results, "0" ads (in my case) plus a search result depicting point number 2, although the person may have point number 4 in mind :)
Android application developer
It's a nice post!
Could anybody show me the difference between a google penguine and google panda?
kasa, kasa i jeszcze raz kasa, liczą się głównie dochody z reklam
I just did a search and it had only two links out of the first 10 Pages that right Pages that were not buy this or buy that. I get that Google needs more money but really are you kidding me. My website sells a lot of merchandise but over saturating results like that is crazy. Hmmm I wonder if that is why they are number 2 in the world on Alexa behind Facebook.
Well-stated post. Where the readers are coming up with comments that Google's first five results are so perfect is beyond me. Google's first five results are Google' only results replicated over and over and over again! I discovered Yippy and it is amazing to actually find choices as opposed to the same sites repeated incessantly in page after page of Google results. Yippy is sometimes a little slow, but the results are so relevant I save overall time.
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