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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

#171

Post by donmcronald »

oefrha wrote: post #86
the_duke wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't like the short Wikipedia excerpts. I almost always want more information, and Google tries to make the Wikipedia link as unintuitive as possible in order to keep the user on Google property. What's more, showing the info box means that the real article link is removed from the results list. Edit: to clarify, I do find the blue Wikipedia link decidedly small and I often have to actively look for it…

That’s just false, showing the info box does not remove the link from itemized search results. If a Wikipedia link is nowhere to be found, that’s indication that the info box isn’t info from Wikipedia in the first place (e.g. movies, certain persons). Same goes for answer snippets.

I wonder if there are multiple UIs in play. I just went and searched for some examples and the box I'm seeing today is fine, but I swear I've had a box in the past where the Wikipedia link was small, buried, and hard to find. When I say hard, I mean it takes a few seconds, but the idea is I have to go hunting for it while Google tries to entice me to click something else which isn't what I want.

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

#172

Post by alex_young »

Angostura wrote: post #169
alex_young wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any site can control indexing through robots.txt. You either want this information in the search engine or you don't. Don't like one of the indexers? Tell it not to index you.

How about if you want the information in a search engine, but you would prefer that the "search engine" didn't just nick the contents and display it on their site, rather than sending searchers to yours?

Isn't this what a search engine is?

Google takes the excerpt which is relevant to your query, displays it to you, along with a link to the resource.

Are we upset that the excerpt is too good? That the link isn't prominent enough? Something else?

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

#173

Post by dragonwriter »

Angostura wrote: post #169
alex_young wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any site can control indexing through robots.txt. You either want this information in the search engine or you don't. Don't like one of the indexers? Tell it not to index you.

How about if you want the information in a search engine, but you would prefer that the "search engine" didn't just nick the contents and display it on their site, rather than sending searchers to yours?

Then allow it only to search engines where you have an agreement, or at least they have provided a public commitment, as to how they will present information that aligns with your preferences. You don't have to use “User-agent: *” for your rules.

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

#174

Post by caymanjim »

I visit Wikipedia dozens of times per day. My most-frequent Google search is "wiki foo". The top link is almost always Wikipedia, and it's almost always exactly what I want. I appreciate the quick facts box at the top, but I still end up on Wikipedia. I also have a Chrome search shortcut so that I can type e.g. "w the west wing" to go directly to the Wikipedia article, but to use that, I need to know the exact spelling and wording of the article title, because Wikipedia's own search engine is horrible. I would venture that Google is the single largest driver of traffic to Wikipedia itself.

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

#175

Post by iso-8859-1 »

simonklitj wrote: post #104
dawnerd wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They surely would if they weren’t needlessly adding terrible UX “features”

Interested. What UX "features" are you referring to?

VisualEditor is not worth it. It's being touted as a massive improvement, but which editors is it really catering too? Most valuable content in Wikipedia is written by a minority! By spending too much money on VisualEditor, you're optimizing for people who are barely adding value anyway! The money could have been spent on an interactive markup tutorial instead. That would be way cheaper, because it has a linear flow. It would also have been easier because it isn't as performance critical, as it doesn't need to load millions of time per day, only as part of the onboarding process.

If you compare Wikimedias spending 5 years ago to what it is now, it has ballooned in such an excessive way if you put it in context. Wikipedia isn't providing double the value of what it was 5 years ago.

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

#176

Post by reaperducer »

psexec wrote: post #164
wnevets wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally love it when my search results just give me the answer I'm looking for This is one of the things I love about google as a user. Googling "what is my ip" or "how many inches in a meter" used to require you to visit some random website filled to the brim with ads.

> what is my ip alias my-ip='dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com'

Awesome. Now try it at a client's off-site location with hardware and terminal locked down by someone else's IT department while you're trying to troubleshoot their connection.

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

#177

Post by reaperducer »

georgeecollins wrote: post #170
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…

Google is selling ads against free content created in Wikipedia, and Wikipedia sees none of that. That isn't fair to Wikipedia and it would be catastrophic for many for-profit websites.

Can't Wikipedia just change its terms of service or licensing if it thinks this is a problem?

You're either free for all, or not.

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

#178

Post by jeromegv »

alex_young wrote: post #172
Angostura wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about if you want the information in a search engine, but you would prefer that the "search engine" didn't just nick the contents and display it on their site, rather than sending searchers to yours?

Isn't this what a search engine is? Google takes the excerpt which is relevant to your query, displays it to you, along with a link to the resource. Are we upset that the excerpt is too good? That the link isn't prominent enough? Something else?

I’m not sure if you’re being dense on purpose. They are not just excerpt. They are taking full on paragraph of content. We aren’t talking of the meta description here. It’s taking so much content that you don’t need to click anymore. Google is now the encyclopedia, with content they did not create.

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

#179

Post by casefields »

xnx wrote: post #129

Alternate headline: "Google Saves Millions of Hours of Time by Providing Answers Directly" Is this a valid analogy?: Imagine you had a brilliant friend who read all the books in a library and answered any question you asked her. Would you say this friend is stealing profit from book publishers?

Then, Cloudfare's DDos protection, reCaptcha, and a bunch of other new nuisances, take it back with extra on top.

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

#180

Post by thoraway1010 »

jgalt212 wrote: post #112
nend wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But in the long term In long term, there won't be free content for Google to scrape and display in search results knowledge graphs as ad supported / free content businesses shut down. Of course, google can create its own content and does so to feed the knowledge graphs, but it's way more expensive to do so. And the math might not be worth it for google manufacture from scratch all this content. So then folks won't…

Google's ad network provides a lot of support to these "free" content options. Google is not bad at creating own content, the amount of data for example they can slurp up from phones running google maps is pretty darn high.

Our local govt has traffic sensors for the highways - huge bucks to install / maintain etc. I can get more granular traffic that is more current from google for free. If you are going to compete with google in a data management / collection business, you are going to be playing with firm with pretty deep ability to ingest and process data.

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