Remember when going down a rabbit hole to learn about the newest, hottest Olympic athlete meant clicking on a link in Google search results that sent you on your way around the Worldwide Web? No longer. Google is moving away from being gateway to the Web and towards becoming an actual Web destination.
We saw this happen for the 2016 presidential candidates and are now see a real depth of content around Olympic athletes housed within Google itself.
You have to wonder how much of an impact this will have on traffic to sites like teamusa.org and nbcolympics.org, two of the most authoritative sites for all-things-U.S.-Olympics. We know that the introduction of quick answers at the top of a Google search results page impacted traffic for ranking sites. Quick answers, usually a simple box containing text-based content that’s been scraped from another site, are often enough to prevent the click. So considering the arsenal of Olympics information that Google has created, augmented by YouTube videos for even stickier content, these richer-than-rich (filthy rich?) search results may make Google both the beginning and end of a search.
Instead of going down a rabbit hole to the most obscure corners of the internet, you might just find everything you’re looking for in the Google Hole (trademark pending).
