WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Results

Re:WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Re... by kbenson on Monday June 05, 2017 @10:28PM (#14494244)

> To make this visceral: what differentiates Google finding me an expensive camera that I can buy from B&H that matches my search criteria and helps me get my work done of Google finding me an expensive article from the Wall Street Journal that matches my search criteria and helps me get my work done?

Likely, what percentage of users come back to search and keep trying other results. From a simplistic point of view, the value proposition to users can be derived what what percentage had their query answered by that source. If WSJ is taking some number of visitors from Google that used to get a page that caused them to stop searching and now providing a page that does not cause them to stop searching, they are providing a less useful resource overall for Google users.

WSJ is providing objectively worse results on average for Google users than they were previously. It makes sense that would cause their ranking to drop.

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Re:WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Re... by crashedsnow on Monday June 05, 2017 @11:09PM (#14494426)

You nailed it. It's in Google's interest to provide the best user experience and a large part of that is optimizing for the "best" result. Whether or not a user returns to search results, or executes a subsequent search are some of the many signals used to determine this.

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Re:WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Re... by camillomiller on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @05:36AM (#14495924)

It's a great metric for a lot of things, but definitively not to determine the value of a piece of journalistic writing. Here we're saying that the article SHOULD be free in order to gain value. So basically we're saying: it's ok to attribute no value to it if Google thinks so. I'm not a fan of hard paywalls, but this is definitively a fallacy in the definition of value, and Google shouldn't have it so easy.

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Re:WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Re... by Consultant32452 on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @07:46AM (#14496487)

Google isn't determining the value of paywalled articles, the general population is. Google is just facilitating the desires of users. The obstructive thing for Google to do would be to put WSJ near the top because Google thinks it's valuable, even though the users find it useless.

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