In late 2012, Google quietly ran an experiment to drive the future of search, modestly called the Daily Information Needs Study. The study was focused on finding information that goes "unGoogled" (i.e. how long the line currently is in a local grocery store). As part of the study, Google discovered that a full 10% of people's daily information needs require more than a quick answer.
To fill this gap, Google launched a new feature - ' In-depth articles' - on August 6th. Now, when you're searching broad topics like stem cell research, happiness, and love, at the bottom of the page you'll find a block of three search results called 'In-depth articles':
In-depth articles are typically long-form content from major publications, but, unlike news results, they may be months or years old. Google seems to be targeting "evergreen" resources, focusing on proven articles from trusted publications.
The First 30 Days It's been just over a month since the release of in-depth articles, and so, with Dr. Meyers help, we decided to take a deeper dive into the data. Most of the data in this report is taken from a set of 10,000 search queries tracked on the morning of Saturday, September 14th.
On that morning, 505 searches (roughly 5.1%) displayed in-depth articles. Accounting for search volume (using Google's global search volume metric), these queries accounted for 9.7% of total search volume for the data set. Interestingly, that 9.7% syncs up pretty well with the 10% gap Google's study revealed.
In Dr. Meyers' original report (based on August 12th data), only 3.5% of searches - 6.9% by volume - showed in-depth articles. It appears that in-depth articles were relatively unchanged for about a month, until Google expanded in-depth overnight around September 12th. This fits a pattern of monthly Google algorithm updates such as Panda, and suggests that in-depth data is not being updated in real-time - at least for now.
In-depth Articles by Category Following are a few breakdowns of in-depth data from September 14th. The 10,000 queries were split evenly into 20 industry categories, and the prevalence of in-depth (by unique query) across categories is shown below:
14.4% - Family & Community 12.8% - Health 12.0% - Law & Government 7.2% - Arts & Entertainment 7.0% - Finance 5.8% - Jobs & Education 5.6% - Hobbies & Leisure 4.8% - Computers & Consumer Electronics 4.4% - Internet & Telecom 3.6% - Food & Groceries 3.2% - Home & Garden 3.2% - Sports & Fitness 3.2% - Travel & Tourism 3.0% - Dining & Nightlife 3.0% - Real Estate 2.8% - Apparel 1.6% - Beauty & Personal Care 1.4% - Retailers & General Merchandise 1.2% - Vehicles 0.8% - Occasions & Gifts
Top 25 Phrases with In-depth Google has suggested that in-depth articles are more likely on general, information-seeking searches. Following are some high-volume searches that showed in-depth articles on the morning of September 14th:
The first 30 days showed some winners and some losers. Between August 12th and September 14th, 240 searches (of the 10,000) gained in-depth results. Among them were "shoes," "toms" and "laptop," while search terms including "forever21," "vanity fair" and "bridesmaids" were among the 87 searches which lost in-depth results.
The Big Winners (Publishers) Across the 505 queries that had in-depth articles, there were 1,515 articles (three per page). We de-duplicated those articles, and were left with 1,227 unique URLs. Just 10 publishers accounted for 65% of those in-depth URLs. Here are the big winners:
nytimes.com - 25.3% wsj.com - 8.0% newyorker.com - 5.7% theatlantic.com - 5.6% wired.com - 4.2% slate.com - 3.9% businessweek.com - 3.7% thedailybeast.com - 3.3% forbes.com - 2.8% nymag.com - 2.7% huffingtonpost.com - 2.6% nature.com - 2.1% npr.org - 2.1% vanityfair.com - 1.9% motherjones.com - 1.8% nationalgeographic.com - 1.8% cnn.com - 1.7% usatoday.com - 1.6% rollingstone.com - 1.3% economist.com - 1.2%
The New York Times dominated in-depth, with more than a quarter of the unique URLs in our data set. Since any search expert would tell you that being first on a list matters, we also took a quick look at the #1 spot. Across the #1 spot (of the block of three), the New York Times had 37% of the unique articles.
Even though big sites dominated the list, some smaller publications did make the cut, such as:
The Charleston Gazette - "router" The Wilson Quarterly - "schizophrenia" Precision Nutrition - "plant based diet"
While Google is clearly starting with well-known, trusted sources, they have signaled that small publications have a fighting chance. For now, though, the scales seem pretty well tipped.
Social Stats for In-depth Articles We thought it might be interesting to see what kind of social muscle the in-depth URLs in our data set packed. Not surprisingly, the unique URLs were skewed heavily toward strong social signals:
Facebook Likes/Shares Mean: 6,611 Median: 1,013 Max: 897,101
Tweets Mean: 574 Median: 124 Max: 75,940
There were some exceptions, and naturally large, popular publications tend to routinely get strong social signals, but Google is clearly showing a preference for pieces that get a lot of attention.
Article Publication Dates On September 18th, Google added publication dates to most in-depth articles. We were able to mine the data to see how those dates broke down (data from 1,141 unique articles with posted publication dates):
Some articles used their original, print publication date. The 1979 article was originally published in Business Week and shows up for the query "stock market". While many articles were published in 2013, we could only verify seven articles published after the original, August 6th launch of in-depth articles:
09/19 - Slate - "weddings" 09/18 - The Wall Street Journal - "airline" 08/13 - The New York Times - "clinton foundation" 08/13 - The Atlantic - "vacation" 08/12 - The New York Times - "firewall" 08/12 - The Atlantic - "obama speech" 08/09 - The Atlantic - "listen to music"
While brand new articles are showing up in in-depth results, they appear to be the exception to the rule. Half of all of the in-depth URLs in our data set had publications dates of 2011 or earlier, and Google is clearly looking for resources that can stand the test of time.
We're continuing our analysis of Forbes articles to get a better correlation data that we're planning to publish in the next post. Does the analysis above make sense to you? What has been your experience with In-depth articles? Please share your feedback via comments.
news by September 20, 2013 at 12:27AM
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