Bad Search = Profit

Google are, by all accounts, making shedloads of money from their AdSense program, which is, of course, interesting since they’ve recently opened it up to a much wider base of websites. When it started I would never have been able to host AdSense ads but for the last few months I have been. And in January I passed the minimum revenue whereby I can get paid. (I decided not to get paid just yet though as they’re “looking into” other ways of making payments other than the current US cheque (sorry, check) of which my bank would take a hearty chunk out of so I’m waiting for them to introduce PayPal or something, but I digress.)

What’s not been so widely reported, though, is how Google are essentially profiting from bad search results, “bad” here being quite a lose term and not meant to apportion blame to Google exactly or to the users who don’t fully understand how to search, but meaning where the page indicated as giving the information requested plainly doesn’t.

I get a lot of traffic from Google, so much that it renders my stats pretty much useless. This happens partly because I have good PageRank (for my sins) but also because there are many many words on this site and the chances of those five words you searched for appearing somewhere scattered in one of my monthly archive pages is often quite high.

So, Google sends someone here and they’re disappointed. Maybe they’re intrigued by my sparkling wit and acrobatic verbiage, but they probably haven’t solved whatever problem it was they were searching for. (Of course, sometimes they do, and that’s great, but often they don’t, and that’s my point).

So, I have two classes of readers. The first is my regulars, you lot who actually read what I write most of the time and understand it within the context of the blog. If any of you have ever clicked on an AdSense ad in the archives I’d be surprised since they tend to be as detached from the spirit of this blog as can be. Then you have the rest, those thousands upon thousands who’ve come here by mistake, who didn’t want to come here in the first place and are now wondering where to go next. They’re the ones who, occasionally, click on the ads, and they’re the ones who are generating a small amount of cash for me and a large amount of cash for Google.

I’d imagine the same process happens on the Google search pages themselves – if the results are useful then you’re going to use them but if they’re bobbins then you’ll check out the sponsored links on the sidebar. Is it not interesting that when Google gets the job done properly it makes no money but when it fails it generates an income?

This isn’t a criticism by any means. The ads are probably useful as a last resort, since they’re generated using the same algorithm that sent that searcher to my site to begin with, and they’re probably the only way of generating income for Google so I don’t begrudge them at all. And I don’t mind them aesthetically, unlike the ads on Yahoo which can only really be surfed using Adblock. I just think it’s interesting.