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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

#271

Post by anchpop »

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.…

> 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!

Maybe this wouldn't be the case if pages were less complicated to edit?

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

#272

Post by deckard1 »

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.

It'd be a bit ironic if we go back towards curated search engines (i.e. catalogs of the 1990s) due to the algorithms making a mess of it.

There was something magical about diving into a hierarchy of arbitrary classification and finding links to new sites you never knew existed.

Nowadays I never discover new gems on Google. Only Pinterest/Quora/fake-Instagram junk.

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

#273

Post by boogies »

oefrha wrote: post #148
doublesCs wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice that we still have decent overlap: we both get annoyed when someone mentions ddg when doing it on the browser is obviously better :-)

Yeah, thank god some people still learn their tools. When I was younger I thought one of the defining characteristics of "techies" is that we open settings/preferences (followed by the advanced version) as soon as we get our hands on a piece of software. Unfortunately it seems the overall techie population is just getting lazier and lazier (not lazy in a good way), and now the norm is, or is sliding towards open the…

The fact that I like configuration is the reason that I ditched Chrome at home and moved from it to Firefox to Waterfox to Palemoon, where I can use Pentadactyl to customize far beyond the limits of any browser I'd used before.

At work I have to use Chrome (and worse, Chrome OS), and I used the settings to disable syncing between the devices I switch between (because I don't want Google to have any extra excuses to handle my data). Some of them I only use for an hour, so I optimize my customizations to be made quickly. I switch the default search engine to get thousands of keywords in seconds, then load AdNauseum for ads, then depending on how long and what I'll use the browser for, I'll get Surfingkeys or a similar extension for general vim-bindings (I've switched between more of these than I have fingers on one hand because they're all inferior to Pentadactyl in somewhat different ways) and wasavi for more extensive vi-like bindings in text fields.

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

#274

Post by freediver »

chris_f wrote: post #261
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…

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 se…

This is a step in a good direction but is hard to scale.

A better approach would be to still extract data from websites like Google does (this works), but automatically attribute share (50%?) of search engine's profits proportional to the website's share of appearances in these results. This money would await the webmaster when they eventually verify domain ownership. This is fair for everyone and creates positive feedback loops.

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

#275

Post by boogies »

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.

Are you looking for https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ ?

> Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. > Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity.

> Get started with searx by using one of the Searx-instances. If you don’t trust anyone, you can set up your own, see Installation.

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

#276

Post by 48309248302 »

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…

Do you think that Wikipedia doesn't want traffic? When people land on Wikipedia it creates brand recognition and the opportunity for them to ask for support from those visitors, which is what keeps Wikipedia going. Some of those users will edit pages while they are there.

What Google is doing is terrible, especially for smaller sites. Those sites depend on traffic to survive.

AMP makes things even worse, because now the visitors never actually go to the website's own independent servers, even if "the content" loads, and Google dictates how the sites have to be built. Web publishers are in the process of losing control of their websites and independence.

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

#277

Post by bartread »

Anthony-G wrote: post #266
puranjay wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DDG's actually worse in many ways. I've just switched back from it to Google because most times I was prepending my searches with !g or rerunning them due to frustration at the crappy results.

Example: in the midst of my house renovation my Hisense TV remote has gone walkabout. After several months of having no idea where it is (I figured it would just turn up - I mean, it has to be in here somewhere, right?), I decided to order a replacement. Amazon is full of knock-offs, but turns out Hisense sell remotes directly.

So I type "Hisense" into DDG and it's the top result, but it's the Chinese site, and I can't figure out how to get to the UK site. The UK site isn't even on the first page of results either. I rerun the search with Google and the Hisense UK site is the top result, and I'm able to quickly find replacement remotes.

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

#278

Post by wslh »

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

or appending "site:news.ycombinator.com"

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

#279

Post by pcmaffey »

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…

Google is monetizing Wikipedia's content. Even if that content is "free", selling it to advertisers counts as stealing.

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

#280

Post by putlake »

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…

This is really quite short-sighted. Sure, customers like this in the short term. But this hurts the website owner.

e.g. 1: You are a restaurant or retailer and your potential customers search Google for your hours of operation or phone number. Google shows them the answer so they never come to your site. So they don't see that you have a free delivery offer during the Covid crisis. And you can't market to them via any campaign that retargets visitors to your site.

e.g. 2: You are a publisher that makes money from ads, like say CelebrityNetWorth [1]. Google steals your content and you never get the traffic you'd like to monetize. This is HN so there will be scorn for the ad-fueled business model. But they serve a need. It's one thing for the market to punish ad-monetized sites, it's quite another for Google to steal from them.

e.g. 3: You are Wikipedia. While your content is free, you rely on community contributions to grow. If someone never visits your site, they don't learn about your mission, don't learn that they can contribute. Your corpus stagnates.

The only reason Google gets away with this is because they are stealing pennies from millions of people rather than millions from a single entity. Indie content creators do not have the resources to fight Google on this, because G offers them an all-or-nothing option[2]: you can either be in Google search results or not. And no one can afford not to be.

Google has been so emboldened that they now change the content and user experience _on the website_.[3] Consumers click through to your site and Google will scroll them to a specific section, and highlight that in yellow. Not only does Google control who gets to your site via the search monopoly, but they steal your content, and control how people experience _your_ site.

[1] https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... [2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en [3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280115/google-search-eng...

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