Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

hackernoon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 299 posts

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#131

Post by onetimemanytime »

crazygringo wrote: post #44

> ...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. > ...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months... "Cost"? "Steal"?! This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is open content , you literally can't steal from it -- being…

semantics...if I read an article on Wiki I might actually send them $50 too. That sustains Wikipedia

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#132

Post by zozbot234 »

millette wrote: post #120

On the other hand, wikipedia's use of nofollow makes it pretty clear they don't want a level playing field. What makes wikipedia great is all the references it builds on, yet those same references never get any "link juice".

Wikipedia uses nofollow to discourage spam edits. Google and other search engines are free to ignore nofollow and try to assess link quality in other ways.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#133

Post by oefrha »

doublesCs wrote: post #127
oefrha wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome has had custom search engine keywords since day one (yes, I actually went to locate a day-one article on this feature[1]). Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce, complete with weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium” you can emulate this with a pointless round trip to DuckDuckGo. [1] https://searchengineland.com/searching-wit…

> Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce If you're not sure I can clarify that for you. I was responding to someone talknig about ddg, and I was showing a better way of doing it. I didn't know that it's possible with Chrome because I don't use it.

In this case I can totally believe it’s innocuous. But as I said, it happens a lot. It happens on Firefox evangelism threads, Chrome bashing threads, DDG evangelism threads, Google bashing threads, etc. where a direct comparison is made. Imagine reading “hey C++ programmers, check out Rust, we have this amazing feature called zero cost abstractions!” over and over. Just really tiring.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#134

Post by ForHackernews »

nend wrote: post #68
crazygringo wrote: post #44

> ...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. > ...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months... "Cost"? "Steal"?! This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is open content , you literally can't steal from it -- being…

As the article points out, the problem isn't specifically that this harms Wikipedia, it's that this practice harms pretty much every for profit business that Google does this to. Pretty much every company in an established space that Google has entered, is losing traffic and thus revenue due to this practice: Yelp, any flight/hotel/tourism based company, video hosting sites, weather data sites, the list goes on and o…

Those businesses should license their content differently, then.

Wikipedia is CC BY-SA licensed.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#135

Post by ratfaced-guy »

nwienert wrote: post #59

Have any HNers used google without ad blocking lately? It’s sort of insane. Even with it, I have just a huge variety of workaround I use to find anything remotely valuable. Usually adding reddit, wiki, HN, SO, examine, and all sort of other specificity filters. If you’re shopping, looking at health issues, comparing things, it’s worthless. If you’re looking for anything scientific it’s worse than worthless, it often…

Yep, google, is a dumpster fire, DDG is my main search engine on mobile and I have not missed it. However, it's still far from optimal. We need a user-driven search engine! No more of this bullshit centralized searcher and censure, we need to flip the script on who gets to decide what kind of filters we want to see. Fuck Google.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#136

Post by jeffbee »

boogies wrote: post #110
boogies wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not underfunded at all. What does worry me is that less page views may mean less engagement in the form of checking sources, flagging problems, and making edits.

Addendum: their revenue was actually following an upward trend as of their last report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report#K... But the number of new registered users and the number of user edits are both decreasing: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects

Serving pages to logged-in users is very costly to Wikimedia. Edits are even more costly.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#138

Post by nsajko »

ysavir wrote: post #102
marcinzm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikimedia Foundation mission is: >The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. The mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible" and donations should exist to support the mission not vice-versa. Google seems to be helping in thei…

> The mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible" No, it's not, but it should go without saying that accomplishing the mission includes keeping Wikipedia alive and functioning. It would hardly be accomplished if Wikemedia goes under, leaving Google, Bing, DDG, and other search engines to either use out-of-date information, or worse: update that information through questionable practices. I understand that…

If Wikimedia never received another dollar again starting today, they could still operate their sites for many years by shedding unessential expenses.

In case of WMF shutting down, Wikipedia's software and data wouldn't be gone, and clones could take its place.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#139

Post by renewiltord »

boogies wrote: post #97
moneywoes wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't less page views also mean less donations?

The Wikimedia Foundation is not underfunded at all. What does worry me is that less page views may mean less engagement in the form of checking sources, flagging problems, and making edits.

I'm pretty confident only a small fraction of people edit anyway and those who would only need a few encounters to start becoming editors.

This is based off the fact that I frequently see:

- "why does X not have a Wikipedia article?"

- "this Wikipedia article is so poorly written"

And very rarely actually see someone edit it. On occasion thousands of people have agreed and hundreds of people have written comments agreeing and only two people edited.

So maybe it does some damage at the margin but overall probably doesn't hurt that much.

Re: Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

#140

Post by xyzzyz »

batmansmk wrote: post #130
crazygringo wrote: post #44

> ...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. > ...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months... "Cost"? "Steal"?! This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is open content , you literally can't steal from it -- being…

Reducing traffic to Wikipedia reduces donations, contributions, brand awareness. Grabbing Wikipedia's added value is like stealing candies from a child.

Wikipedia does not need any donations. If they Wikimedia Foundation puts its cash reserves into safe low yield investments, it’ll be able to run Wikipedia for decades. Of course, it won’t pay for salaries of the current WMF employees, but Wikipedia does only need a few of them.
Post reply on HN