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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

Nit: this article is really criticizing a UI change which makes local results more prominent (in that they take over the entire page). The local results at the top of the page when you search for "Italian restaurants" are all still organic. In fact, whenever there's a map on the right-and side of the page, it's displacing ads.

Now, you can be against Google ever making a UI change, or even against Google showing different results for "Italian restaurants" in New York and Chicago, but this doesn't really have anything to do with "organic" search results.

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You may have missed this part of the article:

The scariest part of this is that, if you sell something using the internet, regardless of whether or not you see yourself as a “local" business - or think you’re competing with Google - Google sees you as competition. Searching for “Camera" or “Buy a Dress Shirt" gets you a nearly identical split of screen real estate as that of “local" searches.

The issue there is that the "organic" results you're talking about that show in either the map or the carousel aren't organic at all - they're google local listings. As a restaurant, you are now incentivized to a) buy ads to get traffic from the ad units b) give google data (effectively building a whole other website) through google+/local.

You are very much being de-incentivized from investing in a page that is outside of google's universe, because you're only shot there is pure organic, which matters less and less.

I find this interesting. I didn't think of Google local listing as not organic but I did the search in the article[1] and sure enough it takes a lot of the real estate. Perhaps, Google could publish a standard way to write your own self-hosted Places page? We will still have questions on how the ranking will work and whether Google will prioritize its own Google+ place pages over self-hosted place pages but I think this would be a start. What do you think?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/Bf74Dd7.png

Well, thereby hangs a tale. But the short answer is that, by and large, Google seems to be aggressively uninterested in scraping that kind of structured/semantic data from the public Web. In fact it even seems to have been active in trying to prevent that kind of data from finding its way into webpages at all: remember the arcane but nasty scrap about metadata in HTML5? Well, this is what that was all about.

Scraping/doing it semantically has copyright implications (Re: Europe) so realistically the Google-owned approach is the most viable one.

Does Europe think that the robots.txt approach is cumbersome for "content" owners? If someone doesn't want anyone to crawl, they'd put something like

User-agent: * Disallow: /

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-s...

First, why do you think Google Maps doesn't crawl the web? Second, why do you think that every business either has a web page or wants a web page?

Google local listings come from a wide range of sources. It's basically the phone book.

> Nit: this article is really criticizing a UI change which makes local results more prominent [...] The local results at the top of the page when you search for "Italian restaurants" are all still organic.

I have yet to experience the Google carousel for myself, but aren't these results all coming from Zagat or G+? So these may not be paid (or pay-for-prominence) results, but they're not the results of a Web search; instead they're the results of a search of a proprietary, Google-controlled database. That's not just giving local results more prominence, that's moving a large part of the page to a whole different kind of search: from Web-crawling to searching a Google-owned and -"curated" database. And in many ways that's more important than whether the results are 'organic' in the narrow sense of 'not play-to-play'.

I'm pretty sure Google Maps predates both Google+ and the Zagat acquisition by a large margin.

Of course it does, but what's your point here? I said that the carousel is space given over to results from non-Web search, not just space given over to local results. The fact that there was already a chunk of the results page given over to non-Web search results doesn't alter the fact that the carousel is a new, further large chunk of space handed over to non-Web search results.

The point is that calling Google Maps anything but organic is wrong by any useful definition of organic.

It's fine to argue about whether Google should be showing anything but ten blue links (maps, images, calculator results...) But refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of searching anything but web pages is just absurd.

In the search market, ANYTHING related to UI impacts clicks and views -- ever since it was repeatedly shown in study after study that after the top 2 results in the SERP click rates drop drastically.

It's not that organic search results are changing, but their VIEWABILITY, and therefore relative importance, is drastically altered

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