It’s been a little over a year now, and implementation of GDPR appears to have settled down a bit. Implementation, from my perspective, was kind of a mess; for months I couldn’t access many high-quality US-based websites like the LA Times, or had to customize my settings often 2-3 times in an hour when browsing sites like BuzzFeed. But by now, my new surfing methods have settled into habits, and I think they are worth a closer look, since I can’t be the only person who has experienced some interesting behavior changes.
To begin with, it helps to have some background about how I use Google.
Pre-GDPR Search Behavior
As a writer of factual, high-value, high-volume content, I am searching constantly, for radically different things. I may spend half a day conducting repeated searches for reviews of 2-person kayaks or employment trends. I may spend hours looking up how to build a chicken coop, or why collagen supplements improve the appearance of the skin. This behavior confuses Google (and YouTube), and Amazon, and so forth, since they tend to think I must be really interested in this content, and they continue to suggest it long after I am done with the subject.
I am also, as an American, mostly searching in English for English results, which naturally leads me to a lot of American websites. I may have a very different experience if I were searching primarily in Dutch, for example.
I also almost never get the actual content I am looking for from the actual top-linked result in Google. And what I mean by that is, if I am searching for “productivity cost of poorly performing employee”, the front page of Google features a ton of articles and blog posts titled things like “the surprising cost of bad employees” or “5 things hiring managers need to do to improve performance” or whatever. It makes sense that these articles rank highly, and I usually click them, but not because I want to read or use them.
Because I am creating original content, and trying to add my own value to the work, I click these articles looking for the underlying information. For example, almost every reputable “5 reasons why”… article cites, in turn, some kind of underlying study. The article will say “according to a new study from Harvard Business Review”… and THAT is what I am looking for. I click through to the underlying study or source material and read that, looking for hard data that I can use to say something more interesting or draw my own conclusions from.
So the front page of Google itself actually has very little use for me; I am using those high-ranking articles as a path to get to some underlying information that is usually much harder to search for directly, but has much more value.
Post-GDPR Search Behavior
Now, when I search Google, there’s a high likelihood the first few results on the front page will be sites I have never visited before, because I am always researching something new and different. And there’s a high likelihood that I will be greeted with some kind of big annoying privacy policy window that blocks the entire content, often immediately followed by another big window asking me to sign up for a newsletter. It’s particularly maddening for me because I probably don’t even want the content on this site; I am really only looking for their underlying source material. So here are my new rules:
- I do not mindlessly click OK. I know a lot of people do, and that’s one way to just make these windows go away forever. It’s also one of the reasons that GDPR has had a smaller-than-anticipated effect on companies collecting and selling your data; most users just click OK and get on with it, which is what they want you to do. I consider privacy a human right, and want to exercise it. So, as annoying as it is, I usually stop and pay attention.
- No Oath sites. Oath (and another company that I don’t remember now) claim to allow you to customize your privacy preferences for all their affiliated sites. While their popup frames this as a favor to you, the reality is that they lead you down an absolutely byzantine path of windows and settings, making it harder and harder for you to actually exercise your right to control how your data is collected and used. Also, if you have customized these settings, the system doesn’t keep them; the only setting they really want from you is the one where you “accept all” and let them do whatever they want. This sneaky, obnoxious, fake “service” thing makes me mad, and has awakened my stubborn streak, so now I won’t visit these sites at all no matter what the content is. That means no TechCrunch, no Yahoo! News, and no Huffington Post (I will update this post when I remember what the other network is that does this). It’s kind of odd to just avoid those domains or click away when the window comes up, but I’m not going to give them the satisfaction.
- I am more selective about the domain. I used to just open the top 3-5 results, looking for their underlying data or for a hot take I can borrow. Now I know that, if the top 3-5 results are joesannoyingblog.com and various domains that I don’t recognize, I will often be confronted with a big privacy policy window that I don’t want to bother dealing with. It’s not worth it for joesannoyingblog.com, no matter how highly it ranks in Google. I will scroll down the page, looking for Forbes or Inc or Business Insider (or Livestrong, or Hubspot, or JAMA, or whatever is relevant to my query). I want the site to look valuable and credible from Google before I bother to click.
- I go further down the rabbit hole. This avoidance of weird privacy policies from companies that don’t actually respect your privacy, or sites that aren’t worth allowing them to track me, often has me going further down Google search results than I ever did in the preceding years, or changing the terms of my query altogether. This is interesting, because we know that over 70% of searchers stop at the top Google result, and less than 5% of searchers ever visit the second page.
While most searchers don’t search like me, and most of the rest of them don’t have this obstinate streak that pays attention to privacy and cookie policies and reacts to them, I still can’t be the only person who has reacted to GDPR in this way.
My GDPR Takeaways
- Searching is slower and less productive, with more time spent immediately clicking away from sites, or interacting with their privacy policy, rather than getting the content I am looking for
- Domain and provenance is more important, since I am being more selective about which Google search results I will actually click on
- Results lower on the page become more important.
This altered search behavior doubtless also colors my own content. Because I have so many ad and questionable site blockers and containers on my browser, and then because I behaviorally avoid so many different types of sites, the result is that my source material, and therefore my content, is probably really different from the content I would be writing if I lived in the US.
It’s to soon to tell if this different experience of searching, and therefore different data sources, and therefore different results, is the kind of thing that will lead to a cultural divide. But it’s definitely worth considering that a heavily filtered internet, whether those filters are my own behavior, browser additions, or the result of legislation, will affect what I think and what I write. I hope that my more attentive discrimination creates more quality and value, rather than less.
Featured image by Dayne Topkin on Unsplash
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