What's with the top header constantly appearing and disappearing in this website?
Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
11–20 of 299 posts
Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
#12Shouldn't Wikimedia Foundation be grateful for that? Their goal is met — people learn stuff even faster, and also they incur less server costs, because Google eats them. For a site without ad revenue, it looks like a total win-win for them!
People perceive that they can get the information for free from Google, so they're a lot less likely to donate to Wikipedia even though that's where Google gets the information from. Imagine a future where Wikipedia finally runs out of money after trying bigger and bigger donation banners and has to stop providing the service. As users expect to see the sidebar in Google's search results pages Google would hoover up…
AIUI, Google does give proper credit to Wikipedia whenever it's reasonable to do so. Technically they don't even need to do this for a lot of basic machine-readable information that Wikidata is making available via CC0.
Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
#13Putting aside the criticisms of Google for its near monopoly on search, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that Wikipedia "loses" a visit just because Google happens to be able to deliver the desired information on the search results page itself. In many cases, visitors aren't using Google search because they want a webpage. They're using Google search because they want an answer to a question. Google is answ…
I dont believe it the case that Google is returning the correct info though, and I believe attributing this primarily to zeroclick is wrong.
As the latter part of the article says, for a while now, google has filled the top of the page with tangently related videos, places to buy music, and other media, when all I wanted was the wikipedia article. They seem to have demoted wikipedia off the first page of many search phrases. I have to search wiki directly or add wikipedia as a search term to bring it back.
Google is not saving clicks, they are making me search twice.
Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
#14Putting aside the criticisms of Google for its near monopoly on search, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that Wikipedia "loses" a visit just because Google happens to be able to deliver the desired information on the search results page itself. In many cases, visitors aren't using Google search because they want a webpage. They're using Google search because they want an answer to a question. Google is answ…
I think this is extremely shortsighted. If this were the whole story, then why would Google be going through the effort of integrating Wikipedia data into zero-click results? Out of charity?
No. Because big picture, those people who go to Google and leave without clicking anything had reinforced that Google finds everything they need easily. It makes them more likely to come back.
So Wikipedia does lose clicks to Google in the sense that it loses to Google an opportunity to impress its brand.
Side note. If you have Firefox I would suggest that you go on Wikipedia.org, right-click the search box, click "Add keyword to this search", and pick a keyword. This makes it faster to find information that you know is on Wikipedia.
Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
#15Shouldn't Wikimedia Foundation be grateful for that? Their goal is met — people learn stuff even faster, and also they incur less server costs, because Google eats them. For a site without ad revenue, it looks like a total win-win for them!
People perceive that they can get the information for free from Google, so they're a lot less likely to donate to Wikipedia even though that's where Google gets the information from. Imagine a future where Wikipedia finally runs out of money after trying bigger and bigger donation banners and has to stop providing the service. As users expect to see the sidebar in Google's search results pages Google would hoover up…
And Wikipedia gets its information from their editors. When are the editors getting their fair share of the money? :')
Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
#16I've definitely noticed that I"ve had to add "wiki" to my search results to see Wikpedia articles to certain subjects I'm searching for whereas in previous years, Wikipedia was almost always the number one result.
I feel like I'm back in the 90s when Yahoo went from a pretty good search engine to mediocre with ads and stuff, and I marveled at the clean simplicity of Google. Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of articles from dubious sources and whereas DDG will pull Wikipedia articles closer to the top.
Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
#17the great irony is that wikipedia-clone sites were a massive part of the original "panda" update
Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
#18I skimmed the article. People search google; it gives a paragraph from Wikipedia. That answers their question, and they go on their way; this has reduced the number of people that click on the link to see Wikipedia. I fail to see the problem. Wikipedia doesn't show ads, and isn't run for profit. If people get the tidbit of info they needed, they've been served. If they didn't click on Wikipedia to get it, that means…
And when fewer and fewer people are exposed to the donation banners/buttons on Wikipedia because they stop at the Google results page, how will Wikipedia keep running?
It might be a non-profit, but donation banners _are_ ads, and denying Wikipedia its page views denies them donations in the same way it would deny other sites ad revenue.
Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
People perceive that they can get the information for free from Google, so they're a lot less likely to donate to Wikipedia even though that's where Google gets the information from. Imagine a future where Wikipedia finally runs out of money after trying bigger and bigger donation banners and has to stop providing the service. As users expect to see the sidebar in Google's search results pages Google would hoover up…
Google, as well as many other companies, has long relied on Wikipedia for its content. Now, Google and Google.org are giving back. Google.org President Jacquelline Fuller today announced a $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment. An additional $1.1 million donation went to the Wikimedia Foundation, courtesy of a campaign where Google employees decided where to direct Google’s donation dollars. https://tech…
Wikipedia spends more than that only for "Donation processing expenses". Of course it is a nice contribution but, in my opinion, very small if compared to the huge value that Google is able to get for free.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...
Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
#20As a user, this is mostly great; I like getting information faster. (Although Google has an alarming habit of showing information that's wrong or outdated.)
As a fan of Wikipedia and other web sites, this is disastrous. Their content is being used by Google and they get little to no benefit for it. It's a similar situation to what the European news agencies were saying about Google News a few years ago. I wasn't so sympathetic to them, but I am more sympathetic to Wikipedia.
It's not a huge problem for Wikipedia since their pages are not ad-supported. But this kind of siphoning of user views is devastating for commercial sites.