For "March Madness" Searches, Google Pushes the Actual Results Off the First Page

For quite a while now, Google has been working on building answers into the search results page rather than send visitors to other sites if those answers are simple and obvious.

This makes sense for everyone, Google gets to keep users on its site, users get the information they want faster.

It's not so great for sites built to cater to a specific answer or type of data, but that's not Google's concern and it shouldn't be.

Still, it does seem like Google is taking this to extremes these days, for example with searches about the NCAA March Madness bracket, a college basketball tournament popular in the US, and which only Americans care about.

If you do a search for "march madness," "NCAA bracket" or anything similar, Google will return the full schedule, match dates, results and so on as a OneBox.

This OneBox takes up pretty much the entire space above the fold. To get to the actual results, users have to scroll down quite a lot.

Arguably, most people doing these searches are looking for information like this. Rather than having them hunt down the information on various sites, it's all laid in front of them.