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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

#231

Post by RestlessMind »

ebg13 wrote: post #158
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.

> filled to the brim with ads You let yourself see ads on the web?

Yes, I do because I prefer compensating content creators, because otherwise we will not have many of those. If some website has shitty ads (blinking banners, auto-playing videos, malware etc), I just avoid those sites altogether.

Since you seem to be someone who doesn't see ads on the web, I am curious to know how you pay for the content you consume? I have come across very few non-ads options which work well. For me, subscription fatigue sets in across various video-on-demand sites and various high-quality newspapers. But for a lot of my family / friends across the globe, subscription charges are high enough that they would rather see ads.

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

#232

Post by stock_toaster »

jeromegv wrote: post #181
encom wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Reddit.com is essentially unusable since the update a few years(?) ago.

I love how people totally ignore the million of daily users based on their personal experience. If it was essentialy unusable, there wouldn’t be millions of people on it.

Yeah, it's the age old "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded".

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

#233

Post by EGreg »

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…

So once again, the ownerless open model beats the closed one. Boo hoo.

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

#234

Post by glenstein »

encom wrote: post #57
MiroF wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What? Reddit.com is essentially unusable since the update a few years(?) ago.

True. But you can still use old.reddit.com. The content is still there, it's just not accessible. So my process has been to search for 'keyword + reddit', click the best search result, then manually type in 'old' in place of 'www' in the url.

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

#235

Post by blululu »

saagarjha wrote: post #202
blululu wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to justify wasting money, but the questionable UX features are a relatively small part of the massive cash fire that is the WMF. Also, while there have been some large and costly failures (Visual Editor), UX features are one of the few areas where I think that the WMF could realistically advance their purpose: increasing engagement with the encyclopedia. Features like Page Previews can be very helpful. There are…

As a casual Wikipedia editor, I enjoy using the visual editor :(

I'm honestly glad to hear that. The main point of the Visual Editor was to make editing Wikipedia easier and more inclusive. The research suggests that it did not really succeed in achieving these goals. This result is a little surprising to me, but there are probably bigger barriers to editing wikipedia than a markup language. For some people the visual editor is great, and I think that as a long term investment it was a good idea (the benefit could have been large) even though it did not pan out. The problem is that the cost and time spent creating it was very high, and the WMF foundation has a lousy track record executing these projects effectively.

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

#236

Post by millette »

zozbot234 wrote: post #132
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.

Editors are usually pretty quick at removing spam links. But yeah.

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

#237

Post by loufe »

RestlessMind wrote: post #231
ebg13 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> filled to the brim with ads You let yourself see ads on the web?

Yes, I do because I prefer compensating content creators, because otherwise we will not have many of those. If some website has shitty ads (blinking banners, auto-playing videos, malware etc), I just avoid those sites altogether. Since you seem to be someone who doesn't see ads on the web, I am curious to know how you pay for the content you consume? I have come across very few non-ads options which work well. For me…

I try my best to contribute for things I care about. I'll send the occaisionally donation into the guardian, ETF, Patron for a youtuber, wikipedia, or whatever. I do have a couple subscriptions like for Spotify or the economist, but otherwise I try to give to stick to donations whenever I feel like I have money to burn.

That being said, I live with the fact that certain content creators get nothing from me, I don't feel great about it but I would never consume their content if I had to go through ads, either.

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

#238

Post by Implicated »

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…

> Google has also been pushing sites that do on-page SEO right heavily in the SERPs.

I can't echo this loud enough - I made great profit by out-ranking heavily established retail outlets for years with super spammy and terrible sites purely with correct on-page SEO and garbage 'keyword optimized' content.

I, as well, now have to append things to searches in order to get real answers. (Or start with a twitter search, depending on the topic)

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

#239

Post by hyperdimension »

pc86 wrote: post #213
ComputerGuru wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why don't you try being a little kinder, especially when you don't have all the facts?

It's not as though web design like knowledge of meta tags and robots.txt is the sum total of everything to know about computers. Maybe they've built their own 8-bitter, or are a motherboard PCB designer? I'd argue that'd put them firmly in the 'computer guru' class. But we don't know, so it's probably better to say nothing at all.

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

#240

Post by spideymans »

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

Woah, thought I might be one of the few that did this. You articulated my reasoning behind it perfectly.

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