The quick answers feature from Google has been a concern for many website owners since it launched. This feature, if you are not yet aware, provides direct answers to people’s searches. There are a number of easy examples of when this is displayed. If you type in “Who was president in 2000” you will see a large box with a picture of Bill Clinton, which can be expanded to show more information about him.
This feature can answer many other questions as well. Converting miles to kilometers, knowing sports scores and much more. The fact that Google is answering queries directly, rather than referring searchers to other websites, certainly makes many people worry.
According to a recent study by Moz, this worry may be somewhat justified. They found that the frequency that Google is answering questions with information on third party websites (Wikipedia mostly) has gone up by 98%.
Of course, Google’s only goal is to provide people with the information that they want as quickly and easily as possible. The fact is, however, for marketers who rely on traffic from Google, this could be something that could become worrisome over time. Today Moz estimates that only between 2 and 4 percent of searches are getting an answer from this feature. That number, however, will undoubtedly grow as Google becomes better at predicting what type of information people actually want.
In addition, as more people are finding this feature useful, they will slowly but surely learn how to phrase their searches better, so that they get these simple answers. While this is certainly not a doomsday scenario for marketers who rely on search, it is a wakeup call that shows that you really need to have multiple sources of traffic in place.
