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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

#211

Post by nostromo »

MiroF wrote: post #43
realusername wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been noticing it for a while, the search quality gets worse and worse every year. For me, the red line was the Panda update in 2011. That update completely destroyed the search quality by bringing dubious quality news articles and ecommerce websites on the top of search, it never really recovered since then.

At this point, I basically have to append "reddit" to every search if I want to get quality answers.

It really is unfortunate.

I loved how Google used to find high quality discussions on all sorts of niche topics (tech, gardening, science, diy...) on sites like MetaFilter and Reddit.

Now those queries seem to lead to mostly videos, low quality sites, and shopping sites.

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

#212

Post by lucasverra »

parkovski wrote: post #194
dehrmann wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I agree. Google perf is indeed better ...and still use Bing (via Ecosia) for 90% of request

https://www.ecosia.org/

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

#213

Post by pc86 »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #199
occamrazor wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting username given the question.

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

#214

Post by secondcoming »

joshuaissac wrote: post #196
xyzzyz wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To quote from that financial statement:

"Volunteers also contribute in several ways to the Foundation’s wiki software: volunteer software developers add new functionality to the code base, and volunteer language specialists add to the code base by translating the wiki interface into different languages. During the year ended June30, 2019, there were 48,361 commits merged, through the efforts of approximately 447 authors/contributors, of which 9,158 commits were through the efforts of approximately 258 volunteers."

If I was one of those volunteers I'd stop.

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

#215

Post by mod »

parkovski wrote: post #194
dehrmann wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

So we think Google is doing a good job, but we also want to dictate to them how they do it?

Seems like a recipe to have a worse product.

The argument that they're so good at what they do, they've created a monopoly, I think is very fragile.

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

#216

Post by PoachedSausage »

levthedev wrote: post #185
xyzzyz wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have to object to this. Wikimedia as of their audited 2019 financial statements ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim... ) already has ~$53m in short term investments, leaving ~$101m in "cash and cash equivalents", which notably often includes Treasury bonds, CDs, etc, anyways. So they are likely already investing all of their cash into safe, low-yield investments already. Even if they were…

I'm personally very thankful for the library of knowledge that is Wikipedia. For a lot of searches on technical matters I usually bypass Google and go directly to Wikipedia. I find that you can often use the references and links to bypass the Ad infested web to some extent.

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

#217

Post by puranjay »

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…

Google has also been pushing sites that do on-page SEO right heavily in the SERPs. Which basically means that SERPs are now filled with copycat content that reads like crap but has all the right headings and keyword densities.

The search experience is genuinely bad now. Nothing organic shows up anymore. It's either heavily optimized cookie cutter content, or some big brand name cutting through the clutter on the strength of its domain authority alone.

I've taken to appending "reddit" to my queries just to know what actual people think about an issue

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

#218

Post by cirno »

ratfaced-guy wrote: post #135
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.

Absolutely; native filtering support to exclude the domains of my choosing would be the killer feature for me that would make me switch to basically any search engine. I'll even sign up for an account there, and all the possible privacy/query logging that entails, to maintain the blacklist state. Browser userscript addons are just too clunky, screw up the number of results per page and don't work on image searches.

Let me block tabloids, hate sites and click farms natively and I'm sold.

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

#219

Post by wyre »

puranjay wrote: post #217
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…

Google has also been pushing sites that do on-page SEO right heavily in the SERPs. Which basically means that SERPs are now filled with copycat content that reads like crap but has all the right headings and keyword densities. The search experience is genuinely bad now. Nothing organic shows up anymore. It's either heavily optimized cookie cutter content, or some big brand name cutting through the clutter on the stre…

I had an idea last night for a browser extension that hides SEO chaff from search engine results. I don't have much programming experience so who knows if I'll work on this or not though.

I also append forum (or site:forumname.com) if I'm looking for more in-depth review than reddit gives.

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