Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019 • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

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…

>Wikipedia has 51.1 million articles in 291 languages, is something like the 5th most visited website in the US, 10th in the world, and they manage to do this without running any ads. Can't we be thankful for the incredible human library of knowledge they've built, and chip in a few dollars if we are able, instead of complaining and telling them they should not accept donations?

But the donations don't go to the people who wrote those articles!

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

#242

Post by metrokoi » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

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 often have to specifically search for a Wikipedia article in Google to get the result for it. For example, if I search for a pharmaceutical molecule, I will get pages of "health line" type pages listing side effects and uses.

Five to ten years ago, the Wikipedia article for the molecule was always in the top three.

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

#243

Post by spideymans » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

JaRail wrote: post #222

realusername wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I've been doing almost unconsciously, I'm adding "wiki" or "reddit" at the end of every query except for programming ones. The only time I'm using the search as intended is for programming error queries where it's way too niche for Google to append low quality news farms / ecommerce websites. That's the only type of query I still get good results.

Even programming questions. If it's something considered popular, you get awful results. Take javascript, I always append "mdn" when I'm trying to look up a language/api detail. Otherwise I'd be sifting through the top ten garbage Q&A or tutorial sites. In the glory days, Page Rank would return reference material first since it was so heavily referenced. But clearly that no longer works in the real world of SEO optim…

Finding good Angular content is damn near impossible on Google, with the immense amount of regurgitated blog spam trying to sell templates via blog posts disguised as guides/tutorials.

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

#244

Post by asdfman123 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

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?

Lots of companies reached monopoly status because they were simply better than the competition.

The point of breaking up monopolies is not to make a moral statement about the company, but because we've found that monopolies are generally bad for society.

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

#245

Post by mundo » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

Only tangentially relevant, but a keyworded bookmark in Firefox is very useful way to get to wikipedia. If you create a bookmark like this:

name: wp

location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

tags:

keyword: wp

then typing 'wp foo' in the url bar will take you straight to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo.

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

#246

Post by olq » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

machello13 wrote: post #221

psexec wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

is this a serious comment? it reads like satire of an HN comment

I for one found this very useful

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

#247

Post by machello13 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

olq wrote: post #246

machello13 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this a serious comment? it reads like satire of an HN comment

I for one found this very useful

Sure, it's a good command to know, but completely apropos of nothing. A command line alias is not at all an alternative to typing "what's my IP" into google, something that even my mom could do.

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

#248

Post by pjscott » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

glenstein wrote: post #234

encom wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds tedious. You should at least be able to skip that last step with one of the various browser extensions to redirect to old.reddit.com automatically, e.g. this thing for Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

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

#249

Post by pvarangot » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

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.

Third party apps link Sync for Android still work

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

#250

Post by pjscott » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

millette wrote: post #236

zozbot234 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the current level of spam link posting, sure. But if getting spam links into Wikipedia were more valuable -- say, if they stopped using rel=nofollow -- I wonder how much the amount of incoming spam would increase.