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Google: Vampire Effect Draws Millions of Eyes
ByMichael WeberScientific Study reveals Google's Methods and Effects European Union Google Antitrust Case
Everyone knows Google's search engine, and many rely on it
every day to find anything they might be looking for. For webmasters too,
Google has become vitally important: the vast majority of website visitors surfs
to them via the search giant, whose market share in some countries exceeds
95%.
The online map service hot-map.com wanted to know if everything was above
board, when in spite of many top rankings on Google for hot map's city and
country maps worldwide, and more people using the web every year, visitor
numbers to hot-map.com were on a mysterious decline.
Since Google left the path of only being a search engine to become a provider
of its own services and content (YouTube, Google Maps, Google News,
Google Weather, Google Finance etc.) webmasters of websites small and
large are complaining about being ousted by the big corporation. It is
conspicuous that on top of the search result pages Google devotes a lot of
prime space to its own services and information in special display formats
(such as Google Maps, product price comparison, flights), as well as to ads,
before listing the actual search results. This leaves not enough space for other
good websites, which are pushed below the page fold, but could have
interested the users as well.
Google calls these added features "Universal Search", recently augmented by
"Knowledge Graph", and claims its intent is to show consumers the
information they are looking for quickly and conveniently. If consumers don't
like Google's search engine, company representatives have repetitively
stated, Competition is just one click away. Only that most users have gotten
used to searching on Google and don't like to change habits, or Google is
simply set as standard search on their devices by default. Also when
consumers type only keywords or a brand name into the browser address bar
instead of a proper URL, for example just "wikipedia" instead of
"www.wikipedia.org", and get redirected to Google. So webmasters are
dependent on the visitor masses, which use the web mostly with Google as
their starting point.
- Here you can download the whole article in English or in German:
File Attachment
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Hot-map.com_Eye_Tracking_EN.pdf | 91.63 KB |
| Hot-map.com_Eye_Tracking_DE.pdf | 91.91 KB |
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