Data gathered by Chartbeat and shared by Axios reveals that, over the past year, Google Search traffic to publishers across the broader web have fallen drastically, and proportionally more so for smaller websites. Referral traffic from Google apparently fell by 60% for “small publishers,” while “medium publishers” (those with between 10,000-100,000 daily pageviews) saw a drop of 47%. “Large publishers,” meanwhile, saw a 22% drop. That last category would be any site getting over 100,000 daily pageviews.
It’s not just Google Search either. While Search traffic dropped by 34%, traffic from Google Discover has also fallen by 15% over the past year, the report found.
That’s not what I mean. I have a keyword like ‘wik’ set to take me to Wikipedia’s search, and if I type ‘wik black pus’, i get the page for that term.
I also have an extension that shows a popup with buttons for different search engines whenever I select text on a page, and I have a similar thing on the phone for text shared from any app. Each of these methods has about twenty-seven sites configured in it. Considering that I look up things on these sites easily a dozen times a day, it’s ridiculous to say that this doesn’t save me time over opening each site.
(P.S.: And this workflow also allows using the keyboard for keyword-triggered search, while the search interface on some sites is getting less accommodating and assumes me mousing around.)