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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.
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.
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.
Now THAT's what I call American resistance to the metric system.
--parasonic
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.
That might be true, but what about when I open a link in a new tab from something I am reading but don't get to it for another 20 minutes. After I get to it I notice that the link is crap and close it right away. Total time spent = 4 seconds. Total time they think spent is 20 minutes 4 seconds.
On the other hand, we will be seeing sites with a lot of completely useless content that make you search around all day to find what you're looking for.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
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.