Google relies on duration of stay data from chrome and google analytics to rank search results. Without knowing how much time people spend on a page, you don’t know if the said page is someone’s wishlist, or a wishlist tool, or the wishlist brand, etc. That’s why they were rewarding verbose content, that’s why SEO optimizers were shoving as much text as possible and that’s why GPT made it even easier to rank pages higher on search engines. Bing will collect every data point it can get its hands on legally. Anyone with ambitions to build a better search engine outside of LLM and even with LLM will be only as good as their data.
Respectfully, I disagree. Google and Bing both deliberately pollute their own search results based on advertising and SEO. This is a user-hostile practice that they can get away with because of inertia and oligopoly. At some point, they will become so user-hostile that an alternative will become appealing.
For example, a search engine that made a good-faith effort to filter out SEO-optimized junk like listicles and slideshow "articles" would be extremely interesting to me. Bonus points for allowing me to permanently blacklist entire domains from search results.
> Google relies on duration of stay data from chrome and google analytics to rank search results
Has Google said this? They might infer duration from time between clicks on different search results, but I've never seen evidence they are using data from Chrome and Google Analytics.
On one hand I find it hard to believe they do not use it. It's not like it's buried in the analytics dashboard. It's a pretty prominent metric. However, I have gotten websites organically ranked that I never implemented an Analytics tag on.
Yes, Google has said this. The use of telemetry from Google Chrome has factored into SERPs as far back as 2010 (perhaps farther but that's when I became aware of it).
Ah yes, 13 year old information. Maybe it was true then, it is not now. Cutts had a known pattern of denying anything and everything about their ranking data until cornered (see his video with Harry Shum of Bing when they caught Bing stealing Google clicks), so I would recommend against using him as a source for almost anything these days.
Believe what you want, but apply some basic logic - why would they not use data they already have?
