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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

#41

Post by monodot »

zozbot234 wrote: post #29
zpeti wrote: post #23

It's a shame that a lot of the antitrust criticisms of google don't focus on Youtube. The fact that youtube is one of the main rivals to wikipedia in results is highly suspicious to me, and should be to antitrust regulators. Of course at this point its a bit of a self reinforcing cycle, because youtube ranks, it gets more and more content, becomes more popular, and so google might be ranking it more and more legitima…

The main rivals to YT are sites like Vimeo and Twitch, not Wikipedia. And I don't think either of those is anywhere near YT-scale. It's really hard to run that kind of service in a profitable way, and even harder to let creators monetize their content directly the way YT does.

Yes, but in SERPs I think the main rivals to YT are independent blogs and content sites. Search for "how-to" type queries on Google, and it will often return videos from its own property (YouTube) ranked above text-based content. Google would prefer you to stay within its ecosystem. This is anticompetitive.

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

#42

Post by softwarejosh »

Sharlin wrote: post #31
sjwright wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That literally makes no sense. You'd rather a rectangle telling you to consume sugar than a rectangle asking if you can support an organisation that provides a service you use?

Ads are easier to block, or just ignore as a fact of life. Donation requests might cause irritating cognitive dissonance.

then you should be asking for a paid membership

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

#43

Post by MiroF »

realusername wrote: post #22
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…

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.

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

#44

Post by crazygringo »

> ...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 open content was part of its original mission statement!

I personally love it when my search results just give me the answer I'm looking for, so I don't have to click through to Wikipedia (or any site) and wade through a page to try to find it, and maybe it's there or maybe it's not.

The idea that Wikipedia's success ought to be measured in pageviews is deeply misguided. The more its content spreads and is reused across the world, online and offline, the better it is for humanity.

And to be clear, this certainly isn't any kind of "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy on Google's part. Wikipedia isn't declining or going away. Every time you need to read an actual whole article, you still go there. This is solely about convenience in getting quick facts.

This is good -- not bad, folks.

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

#45

Post by rodw »

rodw wrote: post #35
gtirloni wrote: post #11

What's with the top header constantly appearing and disappearing in this website?

It seems that it disappears (rolls off the top of the screen) when you scroll down, and reappears when you scroll up. There's little or no "inertia" in that behavior though, so depending on your mousewheel/track-pad/touch scroll behavior that can seem kinda flaky. A tiny scroll-up action brings the sticky header back. I have noticed other sites that do that can be really annoying on mobile, but on a MacOS laptop at l…

UPDATE: Playing with it a little more I do think it is a little flakier than that. There's something weird about the marquee image that makes the header re-appear for reasons I don't understand. If you use the arrow keys for scrolling (so there's no chance of an accidental "bounce" when you stop moving your fingers) the behavior is a little more obvious and consistent, but you can see that when scrolling from the top of the page the header disappears then comes back briefly for reasons that aren't clear to me.

Clever or subtle UI/UX behaviors on the web are hard.

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

#46

Post by zozbot234 »

LunaSea wrote: post #28
bzb3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Wikipedia gets its information from their editors. When are the editors getting their fair share of the money? :')

Wikipedia is a non-profit and money goes to servers and wages for a few staff members. Google gets advertisement money out of it and is a for-profit organisation ...

Actually, the organization behind Wikipedia has way more than "a few" staff members. There's been a perceived problem with excessive spending growth for many years now although to be fair, the increased spending has also allowed for compelling new features, projects, and avenues of editor support. (Stuff like the Visual editor, newer successful projects like Wikivoyage and Wikidata, initiatives to support article-editing in educational and scholarly settings, large-scale contests to support the editing community, etc. etc. just wouln't exist absent that revenue growth.)

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

#47

Post by moneywoes »

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…

Doesn't less page views also mean less donations?

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

armagon wrote: post #4

I skimmed the article. People search google; it gives a paragraph from Wikipedia. That answers their question, and they go on their way; this has reduced the number of people that click on the link to see Wikipedia. I fail to see the problem. Wikipedia doesn't show ads, and isn't run for profit. If people get the tidbit of info they needed, they've been served. If they didn't click on Wikipedia to get it, that means…

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by UncleMeat »

moneywoes wrote: post #47
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…

Doesn't less page views also mean less donations?

That's possible, but not the argument being made here. This is a hypothetical loss.

And it doesn't change the fact that if you have open content then you have open content.

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

#50

Post by aspenmayer »

idoby wrote: post #21
onion2k wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People perceive that they can get the information for free from Google, so they're a lot less likely to donate to Wikipedia even though that's where Google gets the information from. Imagine a future where Wikipedia finally runs out of money after trying bigger and bigger donation banners and has to stop providing the service. As users expect to see the sidebar in Google's search results pages Google would hoover up…

I imagine a future where a project like wikipedia is replicated endlessly by willing users on an IPFS-like network, where people can donate CPU, storage and bandwidth instead of money to pay for a centralized server, simply by running something like ipfs pin wikipedia (or a subset)

Sounds kind of like a newsgroup, with every client also being a server. I think torrents can be dynamically updated now.[1][2] Maybe we already have the tools we need, we just haven’t put all the pieces together yet.

[1] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html

[2] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

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