The key statement in this article, that renders this report largely useless, is of course contained at the very bottom of it:
"The authors conceded that there were differences between their click surveys and actual search results, and that they didn’t have access to internal Google data to verify their results."
In other words, their conclusions are meaningless because they simply don't have access to to the data to determine how Google would rank search results in the fictional scenario that they were attempting to study. They essentially did A/b testing, showing some users fictional, Yelp-heavy search results injected into a fake Google results page, and compared those CTR's to those of an actual Google results page. While the fake pages achieved a higher CTR, that would probably be the case for many custom-crafted results pages curated by humans.
This was a "study" that was paid for by Yelp, in their quest to force Google to feature their results more prominently. I guess when you build your entire business on quasi-extrotion, heavy handed tactics come naturally. But this one falls completely flat for me.
"The authors conceded that there were differences between their click surveys and actual search results, and that they didn’t have access to internal Google data to verify their results."
In other words, their conclusions are meaningless because they simply don't have access to to the data to determine how Google would rank search results in the fictional scenario that they were attempting to study. They essentially did A/b testing, showing some users fictional, Yelp-heavy search results injected into a fake Google results page, and compared those CTR's to those of an actual Google results page. While the fake pages achieved a higher CTR, that would probably be the case for many custom-crafted results pages curated by humans.
This was a "study" that was paid for by Yelp, in their quest to force Google to feature their results more prominently. I guess when you build your entire business on quasi-extrotion, heavy handed tactics come naturally. But this one falls completely flat for me.