First off, I want to say that the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) send my content site 55%-60% of all traffic; not too shabby. Now the bad news, my Google bounce rate is twice that of social media traffic. It gets worse: time on site for social media traffic is 4 times greater than that for search traffic.
Sorry search, you’re just not my source for quality website traffic.
courtesy of Sidewalk Sundays
Forget business for the moment, search engines are also losing relevance in my daily Internet usage too. These are the reasons I find myself turning to Google or Bing, less and less.
- I get my news from social media. Frankly, I’d rather trust people I know (to some degree) than search engine algorithms (that I don’t know at all).
- Social bookmarking. Another crowdsourcing technique I use to select my information. Social bookmark sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, and Reddit let me know what information the marketplace thinks is important.
- Search is not well integrated into the iPad and iPhone. On the other hand, with the Facebook and LinkedIn apps I can easily catch up with the latest in my social network. Even Android-based phones, search and social media are equally accessible. Which brings me to my next thought:
- Apps are my new window into the digital world. I really don’t like search on a mobile device at all. Apps are where it’s at (sic). Small screen size is not conducive to skimming the data overload that search engine page results provide.
- If everyone knows SEO, it makes search engines almost redundant. All it takes is 20 or so well educated affiliate marketers, large brands, and spammers to obscure and bury the good information in any category I’m trying to research.
- The kidnapping and death of perfectly fine key words like “review”, “comparison”, “rank” et al by ingenious SEO spammers. RIP to “top rated” also. It’s no wonder long-tail searches are becoming more popular, we basically have to write our own article to find information that is semi-legitimate.
courtesy of phrozendemon
- If spammers are the best SEOs, then all we get to see is in our SERPs are…sing it with me…Spam. Enough said
- If I want to find something relevant and in detail, I go to YouTube. If I want a good “how to” video or product review, back to YouTube. Even the affiliate marketing videos on software are more helpful than the web pages that show up in Google. Again, no surprise that YouTube is the second most used search engine, traffic chases quality.
- Site search is better than web search. Once I finally find a site that I trust (why is PC Magazine so far down in the rankings when I search PC reviews?), I’d rather use their site search than Google’s spam delivery system.
- Curation, your time has come–again. Closed systems are havens from spammers (thank you Apple), but they are not new. Remember Compuserve? Better the devil you know. Yahoo–by default–is giving up on search and going to the AOL content publisher model, whether Yahoo admits it or not.
It’s not just me who is using social media more than search. Take a look what’s happening to search vs. social media in the UK.
This decade will find search as we know it road kill, left behind by technology’s ever march forward.
What’s your over/under on search, will it die or transmogrify into something cooler, better, shinier, more social.
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