
Wikipedia Is Steadily Losing Google Traffic - thenomad
http://searchengineland.com/wikipedia-confirms-they-are-steadily-losing-google-traffic-228237
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legitster
Google displays their own Answer box over Wikipedia, they display their own
reviews instead of Yelp, they display their own maps over anyone else's
directions.

Is anyone else getting the feeling that Google is becoming a hostile platform
for other businesses?

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et2o
The EU!

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woodymcpecks
Regardless of what Google is doing, it seems like just another sign that the
internet is becoming more and more a new generation of cable TV than a
platform for universal knowledge. And it's becoming it with thunderous
applause...

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krigi
A professor at Harvard, Ben Edelman, has been all over this for several years.
He catalogues the anticompetitive practices of Google and other tech
companies.

[http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=417579](http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=417579)

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Nadya
As mentioned in the comments of the article: What part of the lost traffic is
people figuring out they can search Wikipedia directly?

I've noticed older people are more likely to search Google for Youtube videos
than they are to search Youtube. Same goes for trying to search other sites,
they'll search for something and include "wikipedia" in the query.

The younger ones I've noticed (really small sample size of "my siblings and
their friends") actually search on Wikipedia or Youtube.

Until I started using keywords to search sites directly, I was guilty of the
former method myself.

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justlurkin
I'm partial to the former method for speed, but you almost always need to dive
into the source to understand the "answer" provided. A somewhat relevant
example is typing in a certain spelling of something to check correctness, and
the first results are confirming your spelling, right or wrong. You click into
the results, and you get "x, a common mispelling for y".

Moral of the story, Google is great for finding things fast, but make sure you
validate your results against multiple sources.

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thrownaway2424
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful. Its mission is not to funnel traffic to
intermediaries who can serve ads and skim a penny off the world's hunger for
information. If the question gets answered without clicking through to
wikipedia, that's better for everybody, including Wikimedia who don't have to
pay to serve the query.

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t0mbstone
Wikipedia doesn't show ads.

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thrownaway2424
That's debatable, depending on how you feel about Yet Another Urgent Appeal
From Jimmy Wales, or the difference between advertising and NPR pledge drives.

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redml
I'd maybe care if Wikipedia was a reliable source of unbiased information. It
isn't. All kinds of extremist and special interest groups edit it to their own
desires.

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fapjacks
You're absolutely right -- and that needs to die in a fire -- but studies
consistently show that Wikipedia contains generally accurate information. What
we need is some way to automate the process of exposing shill editors. I would
pay good money for a bullshit detector.

