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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

#261

Post by chris_f »

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…

There is an alternative and IMO more sustainable model for a search engine, specifically for non-organic results (i.e. instant type answers). It is to create connections with each underlying data provider, and based on the search query provide results from their sites in accordance with their display/usage terms.

It also provides the advantage of being able to curate the sources to provide higher quality for niche search topics. [0]

I have been working on a search engine that works this exact way. The challenge is identifying and integrating the data sources for all the potential search intents.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=hiking+in+boston

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

#263

Post by sujinge9 »

Sharlin wrote: post #61
softwarejosh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

then you should be asking for a paid membership

The point is, of course, that you don’t really want to pay for it but feel sort of guilty if reminded that keeping it running costs money. Textbook example of cognitive dissonance.

That sounds like the donation request is being effective...

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

#264

Post by pcj-github »

Although it is handy from a user's perspective to quickly get the answer they want, scraping the information off Wikipedia and packaging it slightly different has always felt like cheating to me. Seems like this behavior will be part of the inevitable anti-trust case against Google.

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

#265

Post by danuker »

colmvp wrote: post #16

I've definitely noticed that I"ve had to add "wiki" to my search results to see Wikpedia articles to certain subjects I'm searching for whereas in previous years, Wikipedia was almost always the number one result. I feel like I'm back in the 90s when Yahoo went from a pretty good search engine to mediocre with ads and stuff, and I marveled at the clean simplicity of Google. Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of ar…

Is Google breaking the "Attribution" requirement of CC-BY-SA?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

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

#266

Post by Anthony-G »

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…

If it's tech-related or even music, history, or philosopy-related, I'll append site:ycombinator.com to my DDG search queries. Unfortunately, it's not just Google search that's full of SEO-optimised crap.

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

#267

Post by nerf0 »

Wikipedia was a text gold mine waiting to be mined. They even publish data dumps themselves that anyone can download. I doubt they had any problem with people "stealing" their data.

Just recently I made a website that extracts information from Wikipedia and presents it in a different way [0].

I think it's a great thing that this is possible.

[0]: https://whataday.info/

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

#268

Post by boogies »

oefrha wrote: post #106
doublesCs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have Firefox I would suggest that you go on Wikipedia.org, right-click the search box, click "Add keyword to this search", and pick a keyword. This makes it faster to find information that you know is on Wikipedia.

Chrome has had custom search engine keywords since day one (yes, I actually went to locate a day-one article on this feature[1]). Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce, complete with weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium” you can emulate this with a pointless round trip to DuckDuckGo. [1] https://searchengineland.com/searching-wit…

> weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium”

My bad. I saw the parent and forgot I'd seen keywords on Chromium. To be fair, Chrome buries this deeper than Firefox, whose payment for pushing Google is presumably smaller (and IIRC has a few built in). It's enough of a hassle to set up that I personally used bangs (there are thousands of them already set up for you) when I was stuck on Chrome on a variety of unsynced devices daily at work before the nCov.

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

#269

Post by boogies »

boogies wrote: post #85
doublesCs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have Firefox I would suggest that you go on Wikipedia.org, right-click the search box, click "Add keyword to this search", and pick a keyword. This makes it faster to find information that you know is on Wikipedia.

This, but also, when you're stuck on Chromium, change the default search to DuckDuckGo or Searx and use !w or !wp to search Wikipedia (and !s !sp if you want Google results for some reason, and !g or !go if you want Google results with a filter bubble).

Addendum: sorry to imply you can't also use keywords there, thanks to oefhra for reminding me you can https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478553

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

#270

Post by 8bitsrule »

In the case of Wikipedia: If a single search result answers someone's question, it probably wasn't all that profound.

30-volume encyclopedias are great for learning in depth, but sometimes you just need to know something fairly trivial... more digits in pi, say.

"71% of [Freddy Mercury] searches end there, without a click to a specific site."

I'd like to know about a lot of things in more depth, but there's only so much time. If I'm focused on reading something that just mentions a name (it assumes I know) I might just search it to complete that omission.

The article fails to differentiate the two search-types, and so leaves that important question hanging.

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