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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

#51

Post by realusername »

MiroF wrote: post #43
realusername wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#52

Post by Gunax »

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…

I sympathize with Google here. The fact is there can only be 10 hits on the first page for each query.

There isn't a correct query result. Any addition necessitates removal of something else.

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

#53

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by rodw »

LunaSea wrote: post #30
zozbot234 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. This is not "Google stealing clicks", it's users saving clicks because they were only interested in looking up that kind of basic information. It optimizes time and effort.

And how will that work when Wikipedia stops existing due to a decrease in funds from people seeing the donation banner?

This is the "blogs kill newspapers" argument again. You're not wrong - and arguably they _did_ - but this is a perennial problem for web content. Aggregators are more profitable than content creators, but they kill their suppliers.

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

#55

Post by Swizec »

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…

> 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)

Except for the very frequent times when Google’s summarization engine conveys the opposite point than the text was making.

I’ve had lots of cases where google reassures me that something is possible (like an iOS feature) because it takes a Yes from paragraph 2 and then procedure from paragraph 10. Click the text and it starts with “You can’t do this but there is this other thing you can do”

Both google’s fault and the seospam answer stuffing fault where they put multiple answers on 1 page.

Very frustrating

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

#56

Post by idoby »

aspenmayer wrote: post #50
idoby wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's right. We need to start thinking decentralized. Instead of using DNS to find a server and HTTP to get the content from it, we should switch to a decentralized lookup of the data itself, sourced from wherever the network can serve it. I don't mind getting one wiki page from Peter and another from Paul.

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

#57

Post by encom »

MiroF wrote: post #43
realusername wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#58

Post by clairity »

doublesCs wrote: post #26
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…

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.

yah, keywords are such a great but probably underutilized feature of firefox. i set up 'wiki' and a bunch of others when i started using firefox over a decade ago. i still use most today, although i've pointedly replaced google with duckduckgo ('g') long ago as well.

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

#59

Post by nwienert »

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 links to a full page of pop sci articles that are just... wrong. Google scholar of course works well.

If you’re searching for news it’s basically entirely mainstream, entirely based on the last news cycle, and entirely homogenous.

And of course the Wikipedia links have gotten harder to click. Keyboard nav still purposely is weird. AMP pages break UX.

It’s funny because if I didn’t know so many tips and tricks I’d basically not “know” anything. I’d buy poor products at high prices, I’d believe the latest pop science, I’d only know one or maybe two mainstream opinions on news, etc.

That the worlds number one information finding service seems to have rolled over to a variety of bad incentives is a bit horrifying.

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

#60

Post by CobsterLock »

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…

I feel like you might have missed the point of the article. They go into the example with weather.com, a for-profit website, that is also losing out on clicks. The general idea seems to be that google goes to the site on behalf of the user then doesn't serve the user ads (or in the case of wikipedia donation a donation banner).
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