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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

#191

Post by zozbot234 »

iso-8859-1 wrote: post #175
simonklitj wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> VisualEditor is not worth it.

Surely it's "worth it" if you want the site to be usable by novice users. This is about optimizing for reach and intellectual diversity, not just "people who are currently adding value".

> Wikipedia isn't providing double the value of what it was 5 years ago.

Wikimedia supports other projects besides Wikipedia itself, and the value it provides has not just doubled but plausibly grown by an order of magnitude compared to its early days. Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata are hugely beneficial to the Internet community, and Wikivoyage is not far behind.

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

#192

Post by httpsterio »

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?

Google should help the users choose whether to visit the site in question or not, but not flat-out remove the need as everything is directly presented in Google. Often the sentences Google shows in the card excerpts are lacking in context, but you wouldn't know without visiting the site.

This would be comparable to write a scientific paper and only reading the headlines of each source you're using

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

#193

Post by buboard »

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…

wikipedia is also losing editors and fact-checkers. It also degrades its image -- why would i contribute my time so that google exploits it to become richer?

this is bad

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

#194

Post by parkovski »

dehrmann wrote: post #125
geeostation wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, it shouldn't be "legal" for one or cartel corporation to mediate between content/data and its users. its downright dystopian.

The "one" part is out fault for not using Bing, but isn't "mediating content" between users and websites essentially the premise of a search engine?

Is it really though? Bing has been consistently worse than Google over the years. Maybe our definition of vendor lock-in needs to change.

Honestly at this point it doesn't even matter how good Bing is - we've been unconsciously trained to work with Google's algorithm in particular and they just have a de facto monopoly on the mental process a person goes through to formulate a search. Everyone's workflow everywhere will be worse and take more time if they voluntarily stop using Google, that's not what I consider a fair competitive landscape.

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

#195

Post by chimen »

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…

Wikipedia relies on donations. With 0-click the visitor never lands on the page and I'm sure that also impacts the results of their campaign.

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

#196

Post by joshuaissac »

xyzzyz wrote: post #140
batmansmk wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The parent poster is correct. WMF spends about US$2m on hosting annually (out of $100m+ in annual donations), and burns almost $90m per year, as if it were some kind of VC-funded startup.[1][2] Spending $46m on salaries is ridiculous when almost all of the work is done by unpaid volunteers.[2]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011

2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...

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

#197

Post by MiroF »

donmcronald wrote: post #171
oefrha wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've absolutely encountered this as well - maybe on mobile?

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

#198

Post by buboard »

wnevets wrote: post #151
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…

> 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.

> filled to the brim with ads.

This was the social contract of the web. You give google free content , they give you back money through adsense. Google broke it, and went overly greedy.

If enough websites band together (incl. wikipedia), they could boycott google and force it to pay them per search click or sth. It's only fair . Google is exploiting a system in their own advantage and to the detriment of others. This is no longer win-win.

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

#199

Post by ComputerGuru »

occamrazor wrote: post #188
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?

Yo can tell google (and any other respectable search engine) not to include snippetsin results, either via robots.txt or with meta elements.

How?

Edit: thanks. I see Google makes it really hard to opt out of featured snippet while retaining regular search result snippet support.

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

#200

Post by saagarjha »

reaperducer wrote: post #176
psexec wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Or your mobile device…
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