New Google Site Search - Hijacks Publisher Revenue & Traffic?

[Linda Buquet]

Google rolled out or is testing a new feature that has many large brands and large publishers like the New York Times, very concerned. If they continue to roll this feature out to smaller sites and brands it's going to affect lots of affiliates and Adsense publishers. I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone in the affiliate marketing community talk about this yet. Lots of people in the SEO community are up in arms about it.

Rather than explain, let me show you an example. Then the articles below can explain it in greater detail than I have time to right now.

Joe surfer searches Google looking for "Trip Advisor" a popular travel site. (Click that link and open in new window) You'll see a new feature - a SITE SEARCH BUTTON under the Trip Advisor listing. (If by chance it's not showing in your serps yet, here's a screenshot.) Cool, Joe thinks, I can stay right on Google and search for what I'm looking for. He types "Disneyland hotels" in the Google SITE search box and this is what he gets!

Check that results page. There are a bunch Trip Advisor's pages (their content), which Google is monetizing with a TON of Adwords ads on the side that are from competing travel sites! If the Joe clicks one of those ads, Google makes money, but TA will lose that visitor and the revenue they could potentially bring.

NORMALLY, prior to this new site search box, the surfer would have clicked the Trip Advisor home page link, gone to the Trip Advisor site and then searched for "Disneyland hotels" right on the destination site they were trying to get to in 1st place. Here's the TA results page Joe would see if he would have conducted the search on teh destination site. TA gets the opportunity to show THEIR sponsored links section and their advertiser's banners ads and they will profit if he clicks!

If Joe stays on Google and does the site search not only is TA not getting the potential click, they aren't getting the chance to show their ads and sponsored links, plus they risk losing the visitor to a competitor, even though Joe typed their name and was trying to get to them. "Google will display ads for competing sites, thereby profiting from ads it sells AGAINST the brand. The feature also keeps users searching on Google pages and not pages of the destination Web site."

Some HUGE brands and media sites are in an uproar about this. Here are some good articles that explain the problem in more detail.

Information Week: Google Search Within Search Box Hurts Affiliates, Says IDC - "Follow-up searches without leaving Google.com means any ad revenue generated by this second search goes to Google and not to site owners, particularly publishers.

New York Times: A New Tool From Google Alarms Sites

Hijacking Affiliate Revenue: Google's New Search Within Search Tool (Registration required)

[Larwee]

There is a lot more to this and The New York Times articles mentions it.

Google will turn it off when asked and evidently did so for Amazon and a couple others. However, if some asks for it to be turned off, they may not be able to get it back later if they change their mind. Google also might make some changes in this whole thing if they get a lot of complaints.

“Some of our retail clients have pretty horrible site search,” he said. “So for them, this will be a benefit. For our larger clients, we’ll probably ask Google to turn this off.”

That is the route that Amazon has apparently chosen. The retailer declined to comment for this article, but last week Google’s search-within-search function did not appear when users entered “amazon.com” into the initial search box.

According to a Google spokeswoman, the company has honored such requests from “a couple” of unnamed businesses. These companies, however, may not be able to reverse their decisions.

“So we ask them to try it out and see if they want it removed,” the spokeswoman said. “We think it could be a really useful feature.”

She added that the feature was currently available for an undisclosed, but relatively small, number of sites, and appeared when Google detected a high probability that a user wanted more refined search results within a specific site. While Google has not received much negative feedback on the service, she said, the company could change it in the future.

[Linda Buquet]

Good points to bring up too Larry. Article was already too long and I was out of time so am glad you brought that up. I'll go add your post to my blog.