Could you source what you're basing your facts on? I know many people like myself are just looking to expand on the text we're searching for, and letting the free market decide what's a good search result.
No-click searches continue to grow in share while google continues to adopt design that presents information outside a traditional link, like a weather widget or the fact you were looking for presented at the top in large text outside the scope of a link.
This suggests a growing share of searches weren’t looking for links in the first place, they were looking for information and when the search engine provided that information, the user left without clicking a link
It does work for that. For a large number of searches, on relatively uncontroversial topics, search engines have effectively become oracles of truth.
This is how google ended up with their modern design that discourages website clicks, they did research into their users and realized most people searching “Abraham Lincoln’s birthday” want to see the top result “February 12, 1809” and not the top result “https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12”
Obviously I’m aware that not all data is uncontroversial and agreed upon, but it’s a fact that a large percentage of searches are quite literally treating search engines as oracles of truth
It does not. I used the moon thing from last year as an example. Here[1] is a very noncontroversial query that still yields factually incorrect results in the box at the top. Yes if you read the results carefully and think about it you'll realize it's wrong but then you're doing the same thing you would be doing otherwise.
>This is how google ended up with their modern design that discourages website clicks, they did research into their users and realized most people searching “Abraham Lincoln’s birthday” want to see the top result “February 12, 1809” and not the top result “https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/february-12”
But this is a false dichotomy. There are more options than either an infobox that says "February 12, 1809" and a "February 12 in history" page. I think you can agree that a link to the Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln will be a fine search result. At most the search engine needs to be smart enough to match "birthday" in the search query against variations of "born on" that are present in the article.
> But this is a false dichotomy. There are more options than either an infobox
I am not saying that there is only a singular way of displaying information.
Instead the point here is that Yes, users who search that are actually trying to use Google as an Oracle of Truth here, and if the top results are anything other than what his actual birthday is, then that is a problem.
So in other words, yes it is being used as an oracle of truth, even if there are different ways of precisely displaying that.
> I think you can agree that a link to the Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln will be a fine search result
Only if the article links is actually the truth, and not some other number. So yes the search engine is being used as an oracle of truth, to find out what the actual answer is to what his actual birthday is.
I’m confident this is factually incorrect for a very very large subset of searches. Probably a majority.