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New Web Metric Likely To Hurt Google
StonyandCher write(s) with news that one of the largest Net measurement companies, Nielsen/NetRatings, is about to abandon page views as its primary metric for comparing sites. Instead the company will use total time spent on a site. The article notes, "This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there. 'It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,' said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings. 'Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'"
Moments ago, Google purchased Nielsen/NetRatings for approximately $135 million in cash. The new metric ranking was immediately disabled for further work.
"New Web metric likely to hurt Google, help YouTube." - very insightful. YouTube better watchout! With this kind of headlines they're likely to get bought. Oh wait.
you can't measure that...
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Now all those people who choose their search engine by its Nielsen/NetRatings ratings are going to stop using Google.....why that might be a few dozen people at least!
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
In my experience, most people don't bother to close their browser when they are done browsing. It's even worse for people used to tabbed browsing. How many times do you shut down the computer at night with tabs containing something you looked at with your morning coffee? I know I do as often as not.
The cake is a pie
Google is its own Web metric
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
Sometimes i visit a site that links a lot of places (an common one is a google search) and open every site in a different browser tab, and then i read. Now, the last tabs are likely to be there for long time, either till i close it, read it, or even click on links there. How that kind of behaviour gives more weight to the sites i opened at the end?
And to make it worse, most browsers now support tabs.
Sessions is what they'll use- and it'll be what many analytics (google included) use for measuring time spent at a site.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
How does nielsen account for google usage that is embedded in other application (firefox), or in your own webpage? In those cases, i'm accessing google via an API rather than surfing over to google.com and typing in my query there.
I think google owns blogger so that should help them out a bit. Folks will generally spend 1:07 on a blog page that takes three scroll roles. Seems everyone reads faster than I do.s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar power the easy way: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
The headline in the original article is misguided.
* First of all, just because they have a different way of ranking, it does not mean Google's revenue's or popularity are suddenly going to fall. Do consumers care where Google falls in some agency's new ranking system ?
* Here is a better metric for for-profit companies: Revenue per user per month. That is what really matters for the bottomline. Even I visit the search page for 5 seconds, if I clicked on that ad to get away from Google, its better than spending 30 mins playing chess at Yahoo. A search engine has both enormous number of users as well as decent revenue per user. And its a better test for comparing business models across companies.
* Ranking web-sites is a multi-dimensional issue. Different types of sites require different metrics. Time per visit or user makes lot of sense for video sites. Number of searches makes sense for search engines. Number of transactions per user or per day makes sense for marketplaces like eBay. So just approaching this using a single metric is not going to work across the internet, especially where revenue is concerned.
Not spending a lot of time on a search engine is a GOOD thing. It means the engine is doing what it is supposed to...direct you quickly to what you are looking for.
Why would Google care if their Nielson rating drops? A very low time-on-page, in my view, as both a user and AdWords advertiser, is good. I want a search engine that gives me what I want and lets me get to the content. I want advertisements that are concise and to the point -- and only catch the right person. The more time a person spends on a search results page, the more likely they are to click my ads for no real purpose other than to "see the result" -- driving up my advertising costs needlessly.
The only ones that benefit from a lot of clicks are websites that advertise themselves and get paid on impression rates. I don't do either (no advertising at all in fact, only our own product pages).
Now THAT's what I call American resistance to the metric system.
--parasonic
How is a ranking going to hurt google? They aren't offering content, they're offering a service - one, which I might add, is best when I don't have to be there long.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
and by "it'll be" I meant- "it is" - doh!
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
This is going to bite the rating company big-time. First thing, a fair percentage of the userbase does things that severely interfere with time-on-site measurements. Blocking cookies is an obvious one. Another is blocking of various Javascript functions like onunload that prevent the page from seeing the user leaving the site. Unless the site eliminates direct off-site links and always redirects through it's own page, which users tend not to like either. And even after resolving all those issues, what constitutes visiting or leaving a site in this day and age of tabbed browsing? Suppose I pull up a Google page and then open 10 search-result links in new tabs, all without closing any tabs. Who gets credit for my time on site? Surely if I spend 10 seconds looking at the Google page and 10 minutes looking at one of the search-result tabs it should be the site I'm looking at that gets credit for my time, but how can the monitoring page code know that I've switched to another tab? Not to mention how the monitoring code handles my leaving the site, and then leaving the site again 5 minutes later, and then leaving the site again a minute after that, as I open links in new tabs, close those tabs and open new ones without reloading the original page.
Done Web analytics. It ain't as easy as the Web analytics' company's salescritters would like you to believe.
Alexa gets its data from a toolbar, apparently...(I actually didn't know that, and now no longer trust their information). Where is Nielsen/NetRatings going to get their data from? It actually poses a good question about all these traffic reports for TV and internet. Are they self reported? Who checks the data? Just curious.
trying to act like they are relevant in the 21st century?
This sort of metric will actually help the 'web 2.0'/ajax-ey parts of Google. If you measure the amount of time I spend on GMail- it is all day, every day. It's always open in a tab. Same with Google Reader and I refresh my iGoogle homepage once in a while. I bet this will show that GMail has a much larger marketshare than was suspected because it is no longer tested on the basis of page views.
Guys, guys- they aren't going to measure how long your WINDOW is open, they are going to measure how long your session is active for. Your session will timeout eventually. They'll be able to account for that, and voila- problem solved.
They already do it, and will be doing it. Google Analytics delivers it. It's quite informative.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
Anyway, they shouldn't just abandon page hits for time spent. Lots of quick impressions should be just as valuable as a few long impressions, maybe even more so(1) depending on the type of ads being sold (static splash vs. animated flash).
(1) Spell-check says "moreso" isn't a word? I'm sure I've seen it before.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I just cant see how this hurts google. Sure, entering a search and retrieving the result is generally VERY quick (maybe this is why its my search engine of choice)...
But for the very reason that I dont need to spend much time there and more often than not its 2 clicks to my result, one click on "search" and the next click on one of the first page search returns; I go there regularly as a starting point, resulting in a massive number of short visits.
If the measure is TOTAL time, google would still be number 1 followed closely by slashdot for me... Because 47 bazillion* one second page views per day is still 47 bazillion seconds of eyeball per day!
*the author realises that, as a complete idiot, he is prone to stupid exaggeration
err!
jak.
This summary takes the article's original title, which compares how this will hurt Google, but help YouTube, as an example of how the new ranking method will affect different sites.
If the ratings didn't change with a new metric, it wouldn't really be a new metric, would it? Why does Slashdot need to spin this just for the negative side?
Personally, I think this is a good change. Page views are a terrible metric, and encourage sites to make bad design choices, like breaking articles into twenty parts to make you keep clicking for more. In the end, the people who look at these metrics (ie, advertisers), are mainly interested in how much time people's eyes are spending on the site. So why not measure that directly?
Sure, sessions will work for sites like forums. However, is there going to be anything shown by session length that won't be shown by page views in that case? What about pages that you can really spend days to weeks at a time staring at, such as the glibc manual or the Coyotos microkernel specification? If the user never refreshes the page before the end of the session, information-packed sites aren't going to be measured at all.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
And will remain so for many, many, many years to come.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I cannot believe anyone would take Neilsen seriously in this day and age, especially in regards to any sort of internet ranking system. The "total time spent on a site" is a very innacurate way to rank web pages. Take for instance Fark.com. It is a site that primarily links to other sites. I spend not very much time on fark, as I am clicking on the links to other sites. I check with fark.com about thirty times each day for new news, but according to the big "N" that does not mean shite.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'
Never seen this definition of Web 2.0 before.
Does this mean we can start putting online articles all back on a single page again now?
Well, maybe some good will come of this after all.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
Use some programmability/flash/whatever to keep pinging back to the host.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The guy who operates the backhoe in the accounting department has said that Google may see two or three fewer truckloads of hundred dollar bills each hour.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
the bottom line, is how often does someone click on your ad and have it result in a purchase? anything else is meaningless.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I predict this change will lead to more sites where all interaction and pacing is under the control of a designer, not the user. I can see it now:
PHB: "How can we get people to stay longer?"
Eager-Beaver Designer: "Let's put everything in Flash, put fewer words per screen and longer pauses between new screens."
PHB: "Great!"
My point is that I am a browser and I use a web browser. That means I want to browse. That means I want to be able to glance at something, make a quick decision, and control the movement to the next chunk of content.
This emphasis on viewing time will cause designers (and their bosses) to try anything they can think of to slow down the user.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
So if they are going to count hours interacting, I suppose they are going to figure out a way to exclude Gmail and competitors?
Any one-dimensional ranking is biased. Bias notwithstanding, Google is a *big player*. What meaning has a ranking beyond that?
If they would have stuck with customary, there wouldn't be a problem.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Google who?
yeh this is my sig
But surely advertisers don't care how long you stay on a site except insofar as it increases your exposure to their ad. E.g., on Slashdot, you might spend ten minutes reading comments but quickly scroll past the ads in the first 30 seconds and the rest is all content. However, if you choose to post a comment, an ad is visible on the comment pages and stays visible during the duration of your composition. I'd say the second ad, continuously viewed during the three mintues it takes to write a comment, is more valuable than the first ad, which goes off screen almost immediately.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
...I'm going to open up my homepage right now, set my CPU not to sleep, and wait for it to top the charts!
http://www.clicksforiphone.com
What matters is not page views or page durations but redirects to pay-sites. That's the value of any site from an advertisers point of view. When I read the NY times I spend a long time there but I'm not likely to be shopping and even if I was in a mood to shop the probability they happen to show me an ad for something I'm interested in is close to nil. Plus the adds they tend to show there are delux flash moving ads or big long columns.
Now when I go to google and type in "blow up dolls" or Airline miles or 629 investments or some purchase worthy topic, I read the ads. Not only that but the ads are short. so I don't spend much time. But I click through a dozen of them into tabs in a few seconds.
When I watch you tube, how long to I look at the ads? probably not at all--I scroll then off screen. But I do see the adds on the leader of the video. But that's only a few second on a 5 minute video. A good and focused 5 seconds yes. Even subject worthy 5 seconds. But not 5 minutes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'"
If 1.0 is surfing one handed while jerking off, Web 2.0 is having a USB pocket pussy connected to an interactive AJAX interface.
In all seriousness, can we dispense with the fucking Web 2.0 crap? It is today's "information superhighway". If you use the phrase without a hint of sarcasm, you are an idiot.
Can someone please explain the rationale for declaring that a metric change will "hurt Google"? When is the last time someone decided to use a particular site based on a commercial web-rating? I certainly don't use Alexa to decide which news sites interest me, at which banks to do online banking, etc.
Certainly there are a few closet Google employees around here... So tell me, are the higher-ups even remotely concerned with a traffic ranking? I mean, if suddenly MSN Search spikes up over Google in the ratings because its so goddamned user-hating that it takes 3 minutes to search a single topic...is anyone going to blow a gasket, provided traffic and revenue remain at present expected levels?
I sincerely doubt it.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
I still get hung up on 'alot'...
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
They are practically shouting to the world that they don't have a clue how to pick the right site to advertise on (or that if they ever did have a clue, they just lost it).
Isn't the sign of a good site that people are able to get what they want QUICKLY?
This can only 'help' pages that take forever to load...
It should be "more so." Not that spell-check is ever to be trusted.
http://wsu.edu/~brians/errors/moreso.html
We have only a few paragraphs to cause that one positive impression, our a 10 second pitch if you like. That is the optimal for "sales" New Web Metric Likely To Hurt Google? One wonders how much time, money and effort have Nielsen & Co have wasted with some media monkeys to force such worthless piece of disinformation to circle around.
Google - best of many search engines, free
motto: "Don't be evil"
MS - monopoly, charges huge fees
motto: "Crush the competition, rape their women and burn their villages"
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there. 'It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,' said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings
Don't you guys see what's going on here. A creative way to throw "Google" in the mix, to get your press release a better publicity.
Englighten me, how is Google affected by NetRatings ranking anyway? I thought their revenue comes from ad clicks and aggregate data they sell to various companies.
Scott Ross seems overly concerned though: don't worry Scott, they don't care, nor do we.
Perhaps you meant "moreover?"
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
I spend waaaaay more time on google maps and gmail and....
See, google isn't just a search engine anymore folks. It is not going to hurt them.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
This will help Google's YouTube because a lot of YouTube page views last 10 minutes.
No matter how you count popularity, Google will do alright.
'If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'
Has anyone explained this to the marketoids? As far as I can tell "Web 2.0" is a marketing term that means "We're new and improved and you should look at us so you can see the ads we present and make us money." I've found no consistent explanation from any of the supposed Web 2.0 purveyors as to exactly what they mean by it. If the ratings folks have a valid and generalizable definition, perhaps they'll pass it on.
From what I can tell, they're taking their definition from blogging, which used to be considered a rude and wasteful practice of piling more and more stuff on the same page. How little things change, except what it's called and how people react to that. But then that's marketing.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If even half of users work like I do, then Google isn't going to suffer...in fact, they might even gain a score higher. Here's why:
I would estimate that for 80% of my day, I have Google open.
Sure, I might not be looking at the page, in fact I'm probably not. I'm probably on one of the 15 tabs that I've opened from the search results. It might take me 5 minutes, or it might take me an hour to work through the results, but eventually I get back to the Google tab, and either search again, or close it.
If I close it, I'm willing to bet not 20 more minutes go by until I'm back there. I also have Google's personal homepage as my homepage, so it already has a head start.
No, I don't think this is going to hurt Google at all.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
rates TV shows based on statistical nonsense of viewership that EXCLUDES people who dont even watch TV.
The amount of time that I spend reading a page has absolutely no bearing on how useful it is.
e.g., I own shares of Ingram Micro ("IM"). In Google, I type "IM". It gives me the day's stock quote (delayed 20 minutes) as the first item returned. As a result of this, I often don't even bother clicking on a page -- Google has found the data for me, and that's that. (I wonder how *that* would fare in Nielsen's rating system -- "no page viewed, oh noes, failed search!")
At any rate, I'll sometimes click on the Yahoo! link for IM to read up briefly on company news. My total time spent reading the subsequent page is usually less than ~10-15 seconds (because I'm usually up-to-speed on what's happening anyway). But that's not to say that the page is useless or that my search failed. In fact, I got what I wanted and all is well.
I can think of numerous other cases (e.g., reference/dictionary/wiki lookups) where the concept of "time spent" does not translate into anything meaningful -- there are lots of times where I simply want to confirm something and then I'm done.
Meh. I doubt that Google is worried.
Okay, I'm not the target of most advertising money ... but I am of some. And that money can find me because of Google's keyword-based ad system. It sure doesn't find me on /. or the blogs or news sites I visit regularly. On those sites, any advertising that's obtrusive enough to get in the way of what I'm after gets Adblocked - pretty much in direct proportion to how much time I spend on those sites, and thus how annoying the particular advertising becomes to me. On a Google search though, if it's about some project I'm in the middle of spending money on, I read every single ad, and follow through on a few. Better than a third of the time I find what I want through the advertising there rather than in the primary search results - although half the time I find it through those primary results, and the remainder I still do better browsing in physical stores.
... but sell me something maybe twice a year. Google's ads are selling me stuff on a monthly basis. And because they're absent the intelligence-insulting eye candy of most culture-obliterating American advertising, I don't even resent them for it.
Considering that I skip ads on TV 98 percent of the time, and view magazine advertising as visual candy at best with zero viable information content, it would be safe to say that Google ads are the only advertising reaching me - well, with some allowance for the local newspapers, where the ads can make good bathroom reading
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
What was the phrase? Oh yes... "it's about the data, stupid."
This "2.0" crap generally has nothing to do with data; it's generally related to bullsh*t, and that's why most of us don't "get it" as having a point. And in that context - page hits are an excellent metric for data; time-sink is an excellent metric for "feel-good" crud. I think a lot of us see TFA as pointless because of that difference. The non-data crap has no point, so a metric that measures something pointless is... pointless.
Ya have to remember - "1.0" success is based on the merit of the data. "2.0" success is effectively based on users, and the data (if any) typically has no actual merit - so page hits have no meaning. It's all about "look at the monkey! look at the silly monkey!" - an area in which Nielsen has great expertise (Wackiness ensues).
The stupidity of "2.0" aside, Nielson is probably correct in their assertion about measuring it (not the stupidity... that's too big to be measured. But the time-sink aspect seems correct.)
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
- As others have mentioned, monetary results of the clickflow.
- How they are doing the measurement. Where do they get their raw numbers? How many samples do they collect, from whom, and how often?
- What the error bands are.
Nielsen just isn't that clueful about the web, either 1.0 or 2.0 (blecch). Google will fall down the ratings? Does it matter? How much cash do they generate with ads that people click through to, versus, say, Yahoo or MSN? Nielsen is once again misapplying their experience with TV in the Web domain.Dog is my co-pilot.
FTFW: ""How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"" Last time I checked, these 'seamless pages' use AJAX or technologies like it, which make calls to other pages through HTTP or XML requests in order to update what's on the current page. You still have page loads happening behind the scenes.
I definitely spend a lot of time on that and I'm sure a many others do too.
Seriously though, it might effect how many people choose to advertise through Google. Advertisers go for websites that they think are popular.
Personally I'd like to know if Nielsen/Netratings plans to measure the time people spend actually looking at a site, rather than having it open in a background window, or leaving it open while they do something else.
Most as are unfortunately irrelevant to the user's needs, ie they try to sell you something you don't want in the first place. As a result, advertisers design their ads to attract more attention in any way possible. The ads therefore become annoying, and the users generally try to avoid them.
It is logical to conclude that if a user spends more time on site A than site B, then they will have trained their memory to remember the position of ads on site A and their eyes to quickly recognise any new ads appeared on site A, with the end result that they will be more effective in automatically avoiding not only clicking but even seeing any ads on site A, for example by remembering exactly how much they have to scroll down when they are on site A to hide all ads from their view. However, on site B where they don't spend much time, they won't be as effective in automatically recognising where the ads are displayed, and their eyes may end up on a banner or text ad for some microseconds, or perhaps they may mistakenly click on an ad cleverly camouflaged as a content link.
From this follows that there may be users who click more on ads displayed on sites they rarely visit, because they have learnt how to avoid ads on their regular sites. Even if an ad actually sells what the user wants to buy, it may have more chances to be clicked on site B than on site A, because on site A the user has trained his brain not to see any ads in the first place.
That said, I would like to point out that marketing is not about selling what you have but having what people want to buy.
This means you have to find out what the people want and then find a way to satisfy their needs. Knowing what the customers are going to buy and approximately how much they are willing to pay, you then have to build your solution to their problem as a product, make it available, and ensure that all potential buyers are aware of its existence and are capable of reaching your product with minimal hassle. That's the most optimal form of marketing.
Unfortunately, because of ignorance (not knowing what marketing is), economic factors (you often have at hand something nobody really wants and you may not be financially capable of building another product), and psychological factors (pathological egoism expressed as the desire to oppress your customers, the people who actually allow your business to survive the first place) many times the marketing practitioners follow less optimal forms of marketing, like trying to force customers buying something they don't really need. This may actually help the profitability of a company in the short-term, but it's not a good long-term strategy as at some point your customers will revolt (avoiding all ads is such a form of revolt).
Marketers who fail to focus on the customers's needs and use ads as a form of propaganda have to grow up or else they will start losing their jobs whenever customer revolts affect the bottom line. When (or if) marketers take their job seriously, they will direct the operations to build the right solutions and the advertisers to stop designing annoying ads and focus more on targeting the right ads to the right users and making their ads actually useful in the customers's daily lives (an ad should ideally help people to find the optimal solution to their problems).
On the Web, all this boils down to more individualised content. The Web is not a mass medium. Unfortunately most advertisers have more experience with print and broadcast media, and try to form analogies of whatever they know about mass media on the Web. They think that an ad should be produced and then "pushed" to the customers. That's wrong. If marketers and advertisers were doing their jobs well, the ads would be "pulled" by the customers themselves and even "shared" between customers having similar needs.
Shhhh... don't let on that you have seen through the charade! The sheep who run your competition will create crappy sites that force visitors to stay on them for a long time in order to get worthwhile content. Users will leave these sites, flocking to sites created by people who, like you, realize that ultimately it's about delivering a site people want to actually use.
The Nielsen metrics debate is really about advertising, which contrary to popular belief, does not apply to all sites. Even those sites that depend on advertising do so in different ways. One metric does not rule them all.
Isn't the sign of a good site that people are able to get what they want QUICKLY?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Adobe must be in heaven, planning all of the extra sales of Flash...
Please wait for the rest of this response:
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I dont use Google becuase it has good Nielsen 'ratings'. In fact I wasnt even aware there was such a thing. I use Google because it works, its simple, and it doesnt shove animated advertisements down my throat.
I'd be more interested in Googles 'rating' of this Neilsen site was than the other way around, if I care about 'ratings' of sites at all.
Basically what I'm trying to say is 'so what?'
I can't tell you how many times I click a link to read something only to be disappointed that the content is completely irrelevant, and I spent a maximum of 3 seconds on the page I visited. A view like that should be near worthless.
over infinity of course....
They should measure in some "standard session timeout value" units (with sites that use other timeout values scaling their results to it), say 20 minutes each, instead of minutes, since that's the actual granularity. Otherwise if it was just in minutes of session held, sites would set them to not expire for days on end.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
I wouldn't want to be the client whose agency uses Nielsens as a pricing guide for my electronic media (they're utterly behind the times, and they set the standard rates for "worth" for broadcast placements). Hell, Nielsens are just about obsolete for broadcast TV as well, seeing as how time shifted viewers don't count. I might know, what, 3 people (?) that don't have some sort of DVR and time-shift absolutely everything they watch.
But, seriously... Google sets their own ad rates (via bidding), and Nielsens matter because?
Is it going to make them have less revenue or something? I sincerely doubt that Google ever gave a shit whether or not they were doing well in a metric as meaningless as page views.
How do you measure if someone has left a website?
Maybe they have another tab/window open and page back and forth.
Maybe they go to lunch with an article open on their computer?
Good idea, impossible to realistically benchmark however.
Google is a company that doesn't care about ratings -- they get paid for clicks, not time spent ignoring the banner ads. What a dumb story.
-- greg
Are you really sure that time spent will hurt google. I know LOTS of people who *always* have a gmail window open.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Google is dead. That's like destroying the whole Alpha Quadrant. At least slashdot is still alive...
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
"Duration of visit" has been around as a rubric on shoddy visitor counters for ages. It can only either determine the duration by subtracting the first and last page request of a user, or running some kind of Javascript "on exit" callback.
The first is never accurate - and completely useless if only a single page is requested - and the second only works in browsers that allow this level of control to a website.
Yes, many web surveys conclude that 99.9% of all users have Javascript enabled (most of these surveys are Javascript-based).
I wonder how this works with tabs.
I open lots of links in their own tab that sit loaded but unseen until I'm done with what I'm doing.
Do those unseen tabs get credit as viewing time?
On the contrary, if the user does not refresh the page before ending the session then that page should be counted as being viewed from the time it is displayed to when the session ends.
Google makes money when people leave their site (assuming they click on adwords), so the quicker people exit the site, the better off Google will be. The only way this hurts Google is in some artificial rating score that has no bearing on Google's profitability or usefulness as a service.
I, for one spend most of my time on google. But that's iGoogle. It's like my second Desktop. All my feeds organized into separate tabs. I have one tab just for "shopping." If google asked me to place ads for that tab alone, I might say yes, Of course, RSS feeds like engadget have ads embedded to the bottom of the posts, so I get them anyway.
I digress, though. Google's gonna make their money on click-through, so it's not important if anyone spends any great of time on the search page, because it's a search engine!!! I don't know how, if at all, this Nielsen thing will hurt them, other than getting fewer advertisers.
If by hurt you mean drop a few ranks in a totally artificial chart created solely because someone fancied creating it then superb.
Somehow I don't think this will be affecting Google's bottom line... unless I'm one of the tiny minority of the 2 billion people who don't check popularity before picking which engine to search for picture's of kittens with amusing text overlays.
More likely Google doesn't give a shit whether or not some Web 2.0 metric gives it a pat on the shoulder or not. Google:
1. Makes its money out of serving ads, not out of being the site where you spend an hour on the same page. If you came, searched and looked at their ads, that's it.
2. Google's secret sauce is the brand name and search algorithm, not its Nielsen rating. People go to Google because they have something to search, and gets new users by word of mouth and by the deals it has with the likes of Mozilla to make their site the default home page. It's not like users start with Nielsen's Top X page and find out about Google there.
In other words, it seems... surrealistic to read the title and summary that Nielsen's ratings will hurt Google. Google doesn't get any income or users out of what rating it has, so the amount of "hurt" will be anywhere between insignificant and none whatsoever.
3. It seems to me like a flawed rating anyway, _especially_ coming from a usability expert. Google's search is a tool. Being able to just do what you needed done, quickly and with a minimum of useless fluff, is what a lot of us would call a good tool.
And the need for such tools won't go away just because some other sites work in a different way. Just because Ebay existed (as an example of a site where users spend a lot of time in a row), didn't make Google obsolete before, so why would it now?
4. Why the heck does it even matter, other than techno-fetishism, in Google's case, whether it's page refreshes or some AJAX kind of thing that fetches the results in the same page? No, seriously. Each search produces a different list, so essentially it _is_ a different "document". The browser is already perfectly able to display a new document. Why would anyone sane want to try to, basically, reinvent the page refresh in Javascript instead of using the browser's existing mechanism? No, seriously.
AJAX and the like make sense when you can actually have most of the data and the processing client-side, and you can actually offer some purely client-side functionality. In Google's case that's not even possible. You can't transfer the whole search database to the browser as XML and let the user tinker with the search expression locally, in the same document. So it's going to involve a round trip to the server and displaying a new result list anyway. So why not just let the browser display the new page?
Nielsen is generally a smart guy, but maybe there is no One True Metric to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. For some things it is a usability advantage to do more client side and not refresh the page, while for other things it makes no sense whatsoever. The focus should be on how well and intuitively is the user served by the site, not on promoting one arbitrary metric like time spent, taken out of context, for everything.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Spell-check says "moreso" isn't a word?
It's not a word, it's two words.
Porn sites get it. And they get it so well they've ignored it. As far as I'm concerned 2.0 is about services (disclaimer: I do work in the industry). Creative, often novel web services. It's creating and ever thickening grime of new services and paradigm shifts. Frankly, it's a mess and for some reason no-ones noticed yet. I have dozens of account with different services. Even my savvy friends frequently try to hook me onto the next "great idea".
Porn sites have CCbill and affiliations. They might not be leading any cutting edge with this, but if there is a 3.0 it will be the end of the lattice-like, patch-work of features and communities. It will be integration maybe even compatibility. I think porn sites cooperate already a lot more then most. Maybe they'll lead the charge.
Quack, quack.
google gets the job done perfectly from the usability standpoint, so why should it be rated down?
"total time spent on a site" brings to me nightmares of greedy carriers execs around a table planning the new motto for the internet of the future: "56K ought to be enough for anybody".
Please someone tell me this is a joke.
wow. You really don't get it!
HTTP is stateless. You cannot get meaningful data from these statistics. Pretty charts, yes. Reliable, meaningful data, no.
Tell me again how you add these apples and oranges: one user opens a site, thoroughly reads a page, studying it for an hour, and yet times out in 20 minutes. Another user opens it in a secondary tab, gets a cup of coffee, answers the phone, in 19 minutes clicks on that tab to see that he was at the wrong page, clicks on another page on that site, and then gives up (timing out in 19+20 minutes).
Case 1, 60 minute visitor is logged as a 20 minute visitor.
Case 2, 10 SECOND visitor is logged as a 39 minute visitor.
It's meaningless, unreliable data.
For a search engine, you don't want users spending a long time looking at your site.
The longer they spend looking at your site, the less effective your search engine is because the users had to spend longer looking for whatever it is they're after. As such, a metric like this is irrelevant, and the number of visits (and shortness of visits) is actually a far more valid way to measure search engines.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Exactly. Maybe the fact that a perfectly usable and popular tool scores badly on their new metrics, _and_ there's no imaginable gain whatsoever if it changed itself needlessly to fit the new metric, should only tell them that their new metric needs some more work.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I hope they go down in flames.....
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
So why wouldn't google introduce a method to measure TOTAL MINUTES spent on a website ?
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Just wanted to point out that there is more to Google than search. GMail, Google Maps, Google Docs, Calendar, Reader, etc. Unlike search all of these services seem to be more geared toward keeping the user in Google space.
I don't see how you can measure time spent on a website. HTTP is a disconnected protocol. There is no way to find out when a user stops looking at a page. If the user uses Google for 5 seconds to find a complex scientific article which they spend 15 minutes reading, how can any tracking code know that they spent more time on the article than they did on Google? You have no way to know when they left the page. Especially if the results are configured to open in a new window and/or you have cross-domain cookies turned off.
This is a red-herring! problem is not solved. Parent does not understand the problem. See other sibling postings for clarifications as to why this guy is mis-informed. This is NOT insightful or informative! It's mis-information!
Oh excellent. So now the sites that are difficult to navigate and take all day to find what you want or to fill out a form because of the bad validation implementations are going to move their way to the top.
Just what we need.
Biomech
"This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there.
Research + tabbed browsing = lots of time on Google.
I do lots of research on many things. Once I have search results, I generally just open each found result in a new tab leaving Google's search result open at all times.
I don't know about you, but frequently when I do a Google search, I open up individual results in their own tab. I imagine that I would show up as spending a lot of time on Google in those cases.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I am running a TiddlyWiki powered site (tiddlywiki.com) which is a single html page that contains all it's information in 'tiddlers' (divs). You can make each tiddler show-up or hide as needed.
What this means is that people come and view the 300+ videos I have on the site and spend 28.5 minutes average on one html page. So now Neilson thinks I am the greatest thing since sliced bread.
At the same time, Google Anayltics sees each tiddler as a page, so they think that the average user visits 14.32 pages in that 28.5 minutes.
I am winning all around on this one.
Nielsen has been loosing importance since the advent of cable tv. Its been a long slow decline into irrelevency, this is just another attemt to find relevancy. The method of "rating" shows just how out of touch they are. I really dont think Google has anything to worry about.
3. It seems to me like a flawed rating anyway, _especially_ coming from a usability expert. Google's search is a tool. Being able to just do what you needed done, quickly and with a minimum of useless fluff, is what a lot of us would call a good tool.
My observations are that people spend more time on a single page because:
- the site is useful, so you are actually doing stuff there (good)
- the site is damn difficult to navigate that you are spending time hunting down stuff (bad)
- the whole site is in Flash (argh X(, bad)
This rating metric almost feels like a pitch to encourage portal type design and bad site design (please don't mention some big database company - you know there if you have been there). Sure good site design does encourage people to stay, but the nature of the site is just as important when interpreting this metric.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
So we go from one meaningless measuring metric to another meaningless metric.
It comes as no surprise that it would be Nielsen to do this to the web, after all -- they've done such a great job with their TV ratings. </sarcasm>
I should have realized how many Nielsen/netrating fanboys there were on Slashdot, and been much more careful to choose my language so as not to inflame that adoring community.
Looking at the sheer number of people who use google, its still going to have minutes ranking higher than most of the other search pages, and its still probably going to have minutes higher than most other websites.
There is not such thing as "total time spent" on a given site, period. Anyone who claims differently is trying to sell you something. Oh, wait...
Example: I visit two pages, rack up two site hits. One page I glance at, the other I read for five minutes. Which site gets the glance credit and which the time spent? The answer is neither, you just can't know.
You can play with time between hits to the same site, but it's really just guess, after all. I've argued the stateless nature HTTP countless times as I write a custom reports against WebSense data to appease the powers that be. It's kind of painful at this point.
How does WebSense get a magic "browser time?" Something like max session time is three minutes, so three minutes of idle is a new session. Consecutive hits on a site give a timespan, the last hit in the session gets the three minutes. There are a few extra number games, but that's the basics. In the end it's mostly meaningless, but gives supervisors a feeling that they know something.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
They're going to try to make the web stateful just for easy "rating" purposes? If advertizers listen to Nielsen the sites like Google will "trick" their sites to hold open connections or force constant refreshs to prove how long they are open. Eventually someone will realize an open browser in the background is no good and they will try to force focus or make browsers modal. Goodbye tabbed browsing. Goodbye windowing systems. Goodbye chairs without automatically locking seatbelts that make you sit through commercials before viewing your search results.
So, does this mean that we may, in the future, not see 30 page long tech reviews?
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics".
Quoting Benjamin Disraeli
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Even if Google's ratings drop (I'm somewhat skeptical if that's true overall, as Google has lots of sticky applications—Gmail, YouTube, etc.) will this really hurt Google all that much? Sure, Google sells ads, but they aren't just displayed on Google's own sites.
If their net ratings are as reliable as their tv ratings then they will be next to useless. I have serious doubts that this monopolistic dinosaur of a company can do anything as sophisticated as net ratings accurately. Google would be a better option IMHO.
how will google recover from this titanic blow?? what will become of the internets??
"'It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge "
But guessing how long people have been on a page is? These people must be working for RIAA
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
This behaviour will become increasingly more prevalent, because of this. Once the concept becomes familiar, it is a logical progression for a user to
[click link]-->[new tab{does not affect viewport}]
when they feel it may be worth a look later, while reading the current page. This saves a greater amount of effort expended in the future, which necessitates memory recall too. Although not accurate, it could be termed 'a will to sloth'. Even if a user is not capable of realising this by their lonesome, they will copy others after seeing how it works.
There is surely a codeable function capable of recording the active tab. If systems of web metrics measuring for marketing purposes do not include this presently, they will in the near future, either as a unique feature, or in an effort to keep up with the competition.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
It's a technique that allows the web server to feed events to the browser. When the server wants to send an event to the browser, it sends the info through the open connection. The browser then handles the event, and then another download is started.
No, I will not work for your startup
My point was directed at the idle window problem and that there is a solution. Now, how well it works is a different story.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
You must be talking about a different Slashdot.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
(1) overall web taffic is up, up, up (meaning increased page views)
Some sites are being pressured by newcomers or are stagnant, despite the environment.
Throw in a few ajax features and blame declining page views on ajax
(2) by not counting page views then how is it known that the eyeball was looking at the page
instead of staring (Or not)at a messenger client? Even so, their is a much reduced ad display area with the latter
your brain
In my opinion, I find I like pages better when I have to spend less time at them to find whatever information I am looking for. I'd go for a kind of reverse-Nielson rating.
I was actually thinking about this recently - the more time I spend on a site the less I view their ads. Two reasons:
1) The simple reason: I'm down in the content area where ads fear to tread (they all compete to be above the fold and that nonsense).
2) The geeky reason: The most annoying ads on the most annoying sites I visit are banned from my viewing by Firefox plugins. I've never been this annoyed by Google ads, but animated images sitting in the middle of the content (I'm looking at you, PCWorld, Slate.com, and CNet) get the BAN!
So time spent on the site is not the right metric. Something smarter is needed. What is that alternative? That's YOUR job, Nielsen.