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Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

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

#141

Post by doublesCs »

oefrha wrote: post #133
doublesCs wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Notice that we still have decent overlap: we both get annoyed when someone mentions ddg when doing it on the browser is obviously better :-)

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

#142

Post by doe88 »

Conscious of this issue I always take time to search (it's not always straightforward) the wikipedia link and click to go to the wikipedia page to somehow not endorse Google's behavior scraping data they do not own and exposing everything in their cards (obviously what I do is certainly useless, I still use Google Search in the first place, anyway, it just be a kind of placebo effect for my brain to feel good).

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

#143

Post by [deleted] »

KorfmannArno wrote: post #109
toohotatopic wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or worse: less active users who edit content. Up until now, an edit was one click away. Now, it's not only one more click away but wikipedia has no way to communicate that editing the result is possible at all.

Wikipedia's editing software also makes editing very difficult.

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by thelean12 »

kortex wrote: post #95
crazygringo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google tries to make the Wikipedia link as undiscoverable as possible Huh? If I search for "who founded the new york times", then immediately below the three-line snippet answer, is a big (not small) blue link to "The New York Times - Wikipedia". In fact, it's literally the easiest, most prominent thing on the page for me to click on. Google is helping to guide me on to visit Wikipedia for more info. I think you're…

Fascinating, quoting the query changes results. Pipes represent the search field: __________________________ |who founded the new york times| __________________________ > Search Results > The New York Times/Founder > Henry Jarvis Raymond [link to google query |Henry Jarvis Raymond|] > The New York Times was founded as the New-York Daily Times on September 18, 1851. Founded by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Ra…

That's because quoting searches has a completely different meaning...

Quotes look for exact results on Google.

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

#146

Post by trianglem »

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…

This line of thinking only works in the case of a non profit like Wikipedia. What about the countless other for profit sites that are taking a hit because of AMP?

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

#147

Post by ibudiallo »

People saying that this is a good thing because they save on server cost. You are right about that part. But the problem is that the search snippet with wiki powered data is a Google Product.

When users consume this data, they become Google customers, not Wikipedia users. Even my little website has seen a 30% drop in traffic, but I appear in much more snippets. Those users get their information and never visit my blog at all. This creates loyal google users [1], not loyal followers

[1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/no-loyalty

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

#148

Post by oefrha »

doublesCs wrote: post #141
oefrha wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Notice that we still have decent overlap: we both get annoyed when someone mentions ddg when doing it on the browser is obviously better :-)

Yeah, thank god some people still learn their tools. When I was younger I thought one of the defining characteristics of "techies" is that we open settings/preferences (followed by the advanced version) as soon as we get our hands on a piece of software. Unfortunately it seems the overall techie population is just getting lazier and lazier (not lazy in a good way), and now the norm is, or is sliding towards open the box -> whine about things not working out-of-box when the feature is right there -> find suboptimal workarounds on StackOverflow or random blogs posted by lazy people.

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

#149

Post by marcinzm »

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…

Wikimedia raises an order of magnitude more funding than it needs to cover basic hosting and operating costs. Losing some of those funds to further it's mission seems very much a net gain for it's mission.

>Wikipedia has costs and needs to raise money to cover those costs.

Hosting cost Wikimedia $2 million last year. It raised $120 million. It spent more on fundraising than it did on hosting.

>Because when the Google and other search engines eliminate the last of Wikipedia's donations

People, amazingly, go to Wikipedia independent of search engines and only a fraction of Wikimedia donations go to hosting costs. Wikipedia can likely survive indefinitely on organic views and their donations.

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

#150

Post by coding123 »

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…

Well, let's ask Wikimedia if it's good or not, because they're the ones affected.
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