Re:Calling Out Google's Bullshit
by saalweachter on Thursday March 22, 2012 @12:06AM
(#3738321)
Having worked for a comparison shopping engine, I blame users.
The typical user of the typical comparison shopping engine is not a user in any real sense of the world. They accidentally stumble onto the site, almost always from Google, and click out to a merchant before they even realize they're on a comparison shopping engine. There are like three guys who actually type the URL of a shopping engine into their address bar and intentionally search on that site for the product they're looking for. This holds across basically all of the top comparison shopping engines. Their direct traffic is almost non-existant, and they are utterly dependent upon search and paid traffic to survive.
And it's all the users' fault. The various engines have spent nearly a decade and literally millions of dollars trying to figure out how to get people to come to them when they want to buy something, and they just don't want to. Users can't deal with remembering a second URL to go to to find something on the internet. They want to go to Google and type in what they're looking for and find it.
The typical user of the typical comparison shopping engine is not a user in any real sense of the world. They accidentally stumble onto the site, almost always from Google, and click out to a merchant before they even realize they're on a comparison shopping engine. There are like three guys who actually type the URL of a shopping engine into their address bar and intentionally search on that site for the product they're looking for. This holds across basically all of the top comparison shopping engines. Their direct traffic is almost non-existant, and they are utterly dependent upon search and paid traffic to survive.
And it's all the users' fault. The various engines have spent nearly a decade and literally millions of dollars trying to figure out how to get people to come to them when they want to buy something, and they just don't want to. Users can't deal with remembering a second URL to go to to find something on the internet. They want to go to Google and type in what they're looking for and find it.