Anyone Notice That Sites Don't Have To Rely On Google So Much For Traffic Any More?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:39:00 PST

One of the driving forces behind some of the legal attacks on Google is that Google is the defacto monopoly on being found online. We've heard over and over again a claim along the lines of "if you're not in Google, you're not online." And there may be some truth in that statement for many websites, but the rise of the social web appears to certainly be decreasing the reliance on Google for "being found." Nearly two years ago, we wrote about the increasing value of "earned" or "passed" links or media. That is, with social communications platforms like Facebook and Twitter, people are promoting various websites themselves and others are discovering them not because of Google, but because their friends, families and colleagues are recommending them.

I have to admit that I was still a little skeptical of how big this would really be, but in the last year (and especially the last six months), I've really changed my mind -- and that's because we're seeing evidence of it directly. For years, our largest referrer every single day was Google. It wasn't even close. Every day, people came from Google (sometimes via searches, sometimes via things like Google Reader or iGoogle), and it simply dominated how people found us. Yet, these days, it's quite rare to see Google as the top referrer to Techdirt on any given day. Instead, it seems that every day we get an onslaught of traffic from at least one (and sometimes more) social communications platforms: StumbleUpon, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook now regularly come in as our biggest referrers. Google still drives a lot of traffic, but our traffic has certainly become a lot more diversified.

And while those companies certainly are not "competitors" to Google in the traditional sense, when it comes to the question of "the only way to be found online is Google," I can say empirically that's simply not true for us.

Along those lines, however, I should note that the reason those social communications systems work is because of people who like what we have to say and want to share it. That doesn't work if your content sucks, so if your content sucks, you may still have to rely on Google (but, even then, part of what Google tries to do is make sure the sucky content gets dropped down as well -- so the best solution might be to not have sucky content).

Related to all this, as we head into a brief holiday break (we'll be back next week, don't worry), I wanted to thank everyone who makes this community so fun and dynamic -- and certainly the folks who made this story possible by regularly sharing our stories on those other platforms. That's mighty kind of you, and it is greatly appreciated.

Finally, again, related to all of this, we never seem to post about the different ways to follow us online, even though most of you have probably figured it out on your own already. Of course, we have an RSS feed, a Twitter feed and a Facebook page (which often fails to update for reasons not at all clear to us). We also have an email list that sends out copies of each of the previous day's posts early in the morning (US time) the following day. You can sign up for that by putting your email address in the box in the upper righthand corner of this page. Feel free to follow us (or not) however you prefer, and thanks for being a part of the community.

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Is Passing Query String Data In Referral URLs A Privacy Violation?

Mike Masnick — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:50:38 PDT

Achura points us to the news that Chris Soghoian, whose work I really respect, has filed an FTC complaint over the way Google handles referral URLs, saying that the company is violating its own privacy policy. Frankly, the whole thing seems like a pretty big stretch. At issue, is the fact that Google search results URLs include the query data, and that's then included in the referral URL, allowing websites to know what people were searching on that got them to click on the website. This is, of course, how pretty much all search engines work, and websites have always used that data to analyze how people are getting to their sites. But Soghoian argues -- correctly -- that there can be personal info included in a query string, and that while Google does offer some tools to let you avoid passing on the query string, they're not that easy to find. He also suggests that Google could just provide aggregate data, rather than each query string.

While I'm pretty big in supporting privacy issues... I have to say that I really don't see this as a big issue. Soghoian tries to use examples of where query strings revealed private info, but those are in cases where the query string was revealed to other third parties who had nothing to do with the transaction in question. But providing that data directly to the site that was clicked? It's hard to see how there's a problem there. Soghoian does point out that Google does mask the query string on URL clicks that come from Gmail accounts, but that's an entirely different situation, because then you're searching through private data. When doing a websearch on public data, and providing it only to a party who is involved in the event, seems totally reasonable. There are plenty of legitimate privacy issues out there. It seems silly to focus on one that seems so inconsequential.

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Techdirt. Stories filed under "referrals"

Anyone Notice That Sites Don't Have To Rely On Google So Much For Traffic Any More?

Is Passing Query String Data In Referral URLs A Privacy Violation?