Some article websites (I’m looking at msn.com right now, as an example) show the first page or so of article content and then have a “Continue Reading” button, which you must click to see the rest of the article. This seems so ridiculous, from a UX perspective–I know how to scroll down to continue reading, so why hide the text and make me click a button, then have me scroll? Why has this become a fairly common practice?

  • xigoi
    2•10 months ago

    How does Google know if you interacted with something on the page?

    • squiblet
      2•10 months ago

      Google offers an analytics package that a huge amount of sites embed. Many other companies like Facebook have software available as well. Mostly people have these to track performance of Google-published ads, but it gathers a LOT more data than that. You also don’t need to use their ad system to put it on your site.

      Anyway, it runs JavaScript to gather information about everything that a visitor does on the site and sends it to Google. You can “opt out” by using a browser extension like NoScript. I assume ad blockers could work too.

      For people developing or running a site, it really gives you a ton of useful information - where your visitors are from, what pages people viewed, how they got to your site (search terms, ads, referrers), how long they spend on your site, even a “heat map” that shows what parts of the page people hovered on with their mouse pointer. The tradeoff is that Google gets all of this information too.