<story><title>How Google is Killing Organic Search</title><url>http://blog.tutorspree.com/post/54349646327/death-of-organic-search</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jcampbell1</author><text>The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories.  If you want to win at the &amp;quot;italian restaurant&amp;quot; search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin.  The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients).&lt;p&gt;Want the &amp;quot;cheapest car insurance&amp;quot;?  Google is zero help.  It sends you to Geico or a bunch of lead-gen sites, and no matter what, you will end up at an insurance company that makes the biggest margins.&lt;p&gt;If you really want the cheapest car insurance, you need to find a company that doesn&amp;#x27;t advertise, and is non-profit, that way your premium is spent buying insurance, not TV ads and Berkshire Hathaway&amp;#x27;s stock appreciation.&lt;p&gt;Whenever I see a SERP full of ads, I search for something different.  When there is nothing but ads, Google is sending you to high-margin crap.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>notatoad</author><text>Internet searches in many categories have always been useless.  Searching for a restaurant or car insurance has never ever returned anything useful on any search engine, ever.  it&amp;#x27;s not as though google used to have incredibly relevant results for a search term like &amp;quot;cheapest car insurance&amp;quot; and now it&amp;#x27;s been replaced by ads.  The only thing a search like that has ever gotten you is the websites of the insurance companies who are well established brands.&lt;p&gt;The categories where google is pushing a lot of ads or supplementary features like knowledge graph are the categories where organic results are not a good experience.  9 times out of 10, when i search for something on google i get a traditional SERP with little to no advertising.  If you&amp;#x27;re searching for something that doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily lend itself to a web search, google &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; be trying to find some way to make that useful to somebody, whether that is a feature that gives you better results or an admission that their organic results for that query are useless, so here have some ads instead.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Google is Killing Organic Search</title><url>http://blog.tutorspree.com/post/54349646327/death-of-organic-search</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jcampbell1</author><text>The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories.  If you want to win at the &amp;quot;italian restaurant&amp;quot; search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin.  The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients).&lt;p&gt;Want the &amp;quot;cheapest car insurance&amp;quot;?  Google is zero help.  It sends you to Geico or a bunch of lead-gen sites, and no matter what, you will end up at an insurance company that makes the biggest margins.&lt;p&gt;If you really want the cheapest car insurance, you need to find a company that doesn&amp;#x27;t advertise, and is non-profit, that way your premium is spent buying insurance, not TV ads and Berkshire Hathaway&amp;#x27;s stock appreciation.&lt;p&gt;Whenever I see a SERP full of ads, I search for something different.  When there is nothing but ads, Google is sending you to high-margin crap.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>netcan</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not quite like that.&lt;p&gt;What advertisers can afford to pay is margin X conversion rate. If people search for cheap socks and you have high margin socks, your conversion rate will be lower. In super competitive markets, the conversion rate is usually what makes one win. For something like insurance quotes, that probably means the one with a known brand, supporting advertising in tv &amp;amp; radio, etc.&lt;p&gt;The quality of the sites and the margins will probably be pretty similar among most players.&lt;p&gt;Where the dynamic you&amp;#x27;re  describing happens is between product categories where you have a high margin &lt;i&gt;per unit&lt;/i&gt; in one product category. Eg. If you want to sell a &amp;#x27;diy divorce kit with a $5 margin&amp;#x27; you will have to outbid divorce lawyers who expect to earn thousands per client. The lawyers will drown everyone else out.</text></comment>