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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

#91

Post by dawnerd »

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.

Yeah but panda also killed ehow which, despite also killing all my stock value, was a huge win for anyone that hated seeing seo spam in every search.

Unfortunately it seems the problem is back, especially with Pinterest, Sfgate, the spruce, etc.

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

#92

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #39
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 DDG is your default search, use the Wikipedia searchbang[0]. !w X will directly search Wikipedia for X. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Even easier, if Firefox is your browser, you can add a search keyword 'w' for Wikipedia and type:

     w X
to directly search Wikipedia for X.

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

#93

Post by nisa »

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…

Google News is also pretty much totally broken for a while. You have to look very hard for a way to sort by date - by default it somehow thinks articles from 2018/2019 are what I'm after and it's often not returning articles that exist, are from normal newspapers and can be found by the same query in Google - there are also no useful facettes left and sometimes there is some sort of amnesia for everything older than 2017. Not sure why they are doing it (maybe it's only broken in Germany due to even more braindead "Leistungsschutzrecht" law but something really feels off.

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

#94

Post by dawnerd »

CobsterLock wrote: post #60
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).

Google for sure is just using the weather.com api like everyone else is doing. They license it for android so it would seem insane they wouldn’t for web.

Also every other search engine shows some form of zero click weather. Really bad example.

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

#95

Post by kortex »

crazygringo wrote: post #84
the_duke wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't like the short Wikipedia excerpts. I almost always want more information, and Google tries to make the Wikipedia link as unintuitive as possible in order to keep the user on Google property. What's more, showing the info box means that the real article link is removed from the results list. Edit: to clarify, I do find the blue Wikipedia link decidedly small and I often have to actively look for it…

> Google tries to make the Wikipedia link as undiscoverable as possible Huh? If I search for "who founded the new york times", then immediately below the three-line snippet answer, is a big (not small) blue link to "The New York Times - Wikipedia". In fact, it's literally the easiest, most prominent thing on the page for me to click on. Google is helping to guide me on to visit Wikipedia for more info. I think you're…

Fascinating, quoting the query changes results. Pipes represent the search field:

__________________________

|who founded the new york times|

__________________________

> Search Results

> The New York Times/Founder

> Henry Jarvis Raymond [link to google query |Henry Jarvis Raymond|]

> The New York Times was founded as the New-York Daily Times on September 18, 1851. Founded by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond and former banker George Jones, the Times was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company.

> The New York Times - Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times]

> People also searched for...

___________________________

|"who founded the new york times"|

___________________________

> Henry Jarvis Raymond [link to google query |Henry Jarvis Raymond|]

> People also searched for...

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

#96

Post by aspenmayer »

idoby wrote: post #56
aspenmayer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think IPFS and Filecoin could solve these problems and keep attribution and data integrity intact. Would be nice to have the privacy of monero or another more private coin to facilitate subscription functionality with built in micropayments.

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

#97

Post by boogies »

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?

The Wikimedia Foundation is not underfunded at all.

What does worry me is that less page views may mean less engagement in the form of checking sources, flagging problems, and making edits.

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

#98

Post by lawrenceyan »

Has Wikipedia itself as a foundation ever commented on what it thinks of this? From an outsider's perspective, it seems like they're largely benefiting from this. Nobody owns the data that is encapsulated within Wikipedia, so there shouldn't be any issue of infringement here either.

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

#99

Post by ma2rten »

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.

In chrome you can type en.wikipedia.org and hit tab. For me it will autocomplete if you just type en.

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

#100

Post by Twixes »

dawnerd wrote: post #91
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.

Yeah but panda also killed ehow which, despite also killing all my stock value, was a huge win for anyone that hated seeing seo spam in every search. Unfortunately it seems the problem is back, especially with Pinterest, Sfgate, the spruce, etc.

Pinterest is a horror, there are Google searches where half the results visible at first are Pinterest links with various TLDs (pinterest.com, .fr, .de etc.)
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