
Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019 - caution
https://hackernoon.com/how-wikipedia-lost-3-billion-organic-search-visits-to-google-in-2019-qz6630u6
======
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.

~~~
nend
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 on.

Google is staking it's claim to content and data. It's legal, and provides
short term benefits to users. But in the long term decreases competition and
entrenches Google further, which is bad for users.

~~~
puranjay
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 strength of its domain authority alone.

I've taken to appending "reddit" to my queries just to know what actual people
think about an issue

~~~
Anthony-G
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.

~~~
bartread
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.

~~~
millette
Since you were looking for the UK version, did you try (no quotes) "Hisense
uk" ?

~~~
bartread
The point is not that in this case with DDG I needed to execute a more
specific search (or, by extension, execute two searches to get what I need).
The point is that _in almost every case_ where I start with DDG I have to
execute more than one search to find what I want. That second search is often
with !g.

That's a shame because, as bad as Google has become, it's still better than
other options. As an example of how bad Google really is, last night I tried
searching for info on how to mount twin slot shelving uprights on an uneven
wall - specifically a wall where the otherwise smooth plaster is less than
perfectly vertical (there's an undulation reflecting imperfections in the
underlying brickwork). The result? Just pages and pages of SEO spam/"content
marketing" on the very basics of fitting twin slot shelving, all of which
assumes that your walls are perfectly vertical across their entire surface,
and none of which has any kind of troubleshooting hints and tips. I probably
tried 10 different search query variants before giving up in disgust.

Google is outright terrible, and its much touted AI is laughably poor[1]. But
DuckDuckGo is _worse_. I'm simply choosing the least bad option, which
unfortunately isn't saying much.

 _[1] Or enragingly poor depending on your mood and perspective._

------
colmvp
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 articles from dubious
sources and whereas DDG will pull Wikipedia articles closer to the top.

~~~
doublesCs
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.

~~~
oefrha
Chrome has had custom search engine keywords since day one (yes, I actually
went to locate a day-one article on this feature[1]). Not sure why every time
this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox
secret sauce, complete with weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium”
you can emulate this with a pointless round trip to DuckDuckGo.

[1] [https://searchengineland.com/searching-with-google-chrome-
om...](https://searchengineland.com/searching-with-google-chrome-
omnibox-14664)

~~~
doublesCs
> Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if
> it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce

If you're not sure I can clarify that for you. I was responding to someone
talknig about ddg, and I was showing a better way of doing it. I didn't know
that it's possible with Chrome because I don't use it.

~~~
oefrha
In this case I can totally believe it’s innocuous. But as I said, it happens
_a lot_. It happens on Firefox evangelism threads, Chrome bashing threads, DDG
evangelism threads, Google bashing threads, etc. where a direct comparison is
made. Imagine reading “hey C++ programmers, check out Rust, we have this
amazing feature called zero cost abstractions!” over and over. Just really
tiring.

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

~~~
oefrha
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 box -> whine about things not
working out-of-box when the feature is right there -> find suboptimal
workarounds on StackOverflow or random blogs posted by lazy people.

~~~
boogies
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.

------
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.

~~~
ratfaced-guy
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.

~~~
cirno
Absolutely; native filtering support to exclude the domains of my choosing
would be the killer feature for me that would make me switch to basically any
search engine. I'll even sign up for an account there, and all the possible
privacy/query logging that entails, to maintain the blacklist state. Browser
userscript addons are just too clunky, screw up the number of results per page
and don't work on image searches.

Let me block tabloids, hate sites and click farms natively and I'm sold.

------
Monory
Shouldn't Wikimedia Foundation be grateful for that? Their goal is met —
people learn stuff even faster, and also they incur less server costs, because
Google eats them.

For a site without ad revenue, it looks like a total win-win for them!

~~~
onion2k
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 all the data and bring control of it in-house, and we would only see
whichever facts Google chooses for us. I'm not sure that would be a good
thing.

~~~
tantalor
_Google, as well as many other companies, has long relied on Wikipedia for its
content. Now, Google and Google.org are giving back._

 _Google.org President Jacquelline Fuller today announced a $2 million
contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment. An additional $1.1 million donation
went to the Wikimedia Foundation, courtesy of a campaign where Google
employees decided where to direct Google’s donation dollars._

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-
donates-2-milli...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-
donates-2-million-to-wikipedias-parent-org/)

~~~
pydry
I remember when Wikipedia used to warn against donations from Google and the
like and running ads because even if it didn't undermine their independence it
would at the very least undermine the perception of their independence.

Looks like they're ok with it now though.

I suspect it won't be too long before they get used to this largesse and won't
want to do anything that might jeapoardize it.

~~~
Cthulhu_
The difference is that google's donation is a no-strings-attached donation,
whereas if they were running ads, Google could decide to hold their payout or
serve hostile and invasive ads. Running ads on that scale equals leverage.

------
gundmc
I see a lot of misinformation in the comments here across multiple threads.
Here are a couple sourced rebuttals.

> Featured snippets means no one clicks through to the source and thus
> underlying sites lose money.

Fact: Features snippets are optional for site creators and can lead to
dramatically increased engagement in terms of sessions and CTR. [1][2]

> Weather.com in particular is hurt because it is ad supported no one leaves
> the Google page for weather.

Fact: The Weather Company happily partners with Google for this functionality.
“The Weather Company, alongside governments, partner with Google to provide
the world’s best weather solutions. We are happy to see Google continue to
join with us and others in helping citizens stay informed.”[3]

[1] - [https://searchengineland.com/seo-featured-snippets-leads-
big...](https://searchengineland.com/seo-featured-snippets-leads-big-
gains-236212)

[2] - [https://blog.alexa.com/featured-snippets-in-
search/](https://blog.alexa.com/featured-snippets-in-search/)

[3] - [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-
gang/wp/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-
gang/wp/2015/09/01/google-takes-another-leap-into-the-weather-biz-with-
hurricane-tracker/)

------
zpeti
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 legitimately.

But I find it impossible to believe that youtube would have done as well and
would be doing as well in SERPS if it wasn't a google property. They've
clearly built another site and brand with their own monopoly, similar to
internet explorer by microsoft.

It would be such an easy target to go after imo.

~~~
zozbot234
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.

~~~
monodot
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.

------
ibudiallo
People saying that this is a good thing because they save on server cost. You
are right about that part. But the problem is that the search snippet with
wiki powered data is a Google Product.

When users consume this data, they become Google customers, not Wikipedia
users. Even my little website has seen a 30% drop in traffic, but I appear in
much more snippets. Those users get their information and never visit my blog
at all. This creates loyal google users [1], not loyal < insert blog/business
name here> followers

[1]: [https://idiallo.com/blog/no-loyalty](https://idiallo.com/blog/no-
loyalty)

~~~
fillipvt
You can disallow Featured Snippets with `max-snippet`. Read the docs here:
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812)

------
blakesterz
"Out of nearly 890,000 monthly searches worldwide, only 30,000 actually become
search visits to a website"

Wow, I never thought about it, but I be my searches vs. clicks ratio is about
the same for many searches. Google must being doing this on purpose, which
must be hurting many sites. I'm sure I've read about this before, but I'm not
sure I've seen those numbers before.

------
armagon
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 Wikipedia saves money.
This seems like a good thing to me.

~~~
ysavir
And when fewer and fewer people are exposed to the donation banners/buttons on
Wikipedia because they stop at the Google results page, how will Wikipedia
keep running?

It might be a non-profit, but donation banners _are_ ads, and denying
Wikipedia its page views denies them donations in the same way it would deny
other sites ad revenue.

~~~
marcinzm
Wikimedia Foundation mission is:

>The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people
around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free
license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and
globally.

The mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible" and donations
should exist to support the mission not vice-versa. Google seems to be helping
in their mission of disseminating information.

~~~
ysavir
> The mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible"

No, it's not, but it should go without saying that accomplishing the mission
includes keeping Wikipedia alive and functioning. It would hardly be
accomplished if Wikemedia goes under, leaving Google, Bing, DDG, and other
search engines to either use out-of-date information, or worse: update that
information through questionable practices.

I understand that Wikipedia is a non-profit organization. But that doesn't
mean that they don't have costs that _need_ to be paid, nor does it mean that
they will celebrate shutting down and handing responsibility for their mission
over to a for-profit company that has no concern for that mission.

Wikipedia has costs and needs to raise money to cover those costs. Caching
results on Google search pages may reduce some hosting expenses, but that's
only a gain so long as the money saved in server costs is more than the money
lost from disappearing donations.

And an organization without consistent revenue (such as from selling a product
or service) needs much more runway than an organization that can depend on
sales to regularly replenish the bank account. Because when the Google and
other search engines eliminate the last of Wikipedia's donations, the only
factor in Wikipedia's lifespan is how much cash they have in their coffers.
And the more donations they collect now, the longer the runway they will have.

~~~
marcinzm
Wikimedia raises an order of magnitude more funding than it needs to cover
basic hosting and operating costs. Losing some of those funds to further it's
mission seems very much a net gain for it's mission.

>Wikipedia has costs and needs to raise money to cover those costs.

Hosting cost Wikimedia $2 million last year. It raised $120 million. It spent
more on fundraising than it did on hosting.

>Because when the Google and other search engines eliminate the last of
Wikipedia's donations

People, amazingly, go to Wikipedia independent of search engines and only a
fraction of Wikimedia donations go to hosting costs. Wikipedia can likely
survive indefinitely on organic views and their donations.

------
mundo
Only tangentially relevant, but a keyworded bookmark in Firefox is very useful
way to get to wikipedia. If you create a bookmark like this:

name: wp

location: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s)

tags:

keyword: wp

then typing 'wp foo' in the url bar will take you straight to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo).

~~~
Aachen
I do the same but with "wi" because I find it's nicer to type, but yeah this
sort of thing lets me skip search pages regularly. I also have a shortcut for
word definitions in English and Dutch, skipping the YouTube search results
page and go straight to the top hit, Dutch and German Wikipedia... I may like
shortcuts a little too much.

------
xnx
Alternate headline: "Google Saves Millions of Hours of Time by Providing
Answers Directly"

Is this a valid analogy?: Imagine you had a brilliant friend who read all the
books in a library and answered any question you asked her. Would you say this
friend is stealing profit from book publishers?

~~~
Barrin92
If my friend was a billion-dollar company that sells ads, then yes I would.
Google is taking the intellectual property of other content producers and
monetizing it directly.

This impoverishes the rest of the internet and redistributes money from a
diverse field of competitors to a single quasi-monopolistic company. Which is
bad for the internet as an ecosystem long term.

Countries like France and the European Union with the copyright directive last
year luckily strengthened the property rights of news organisations and Google
had to strip snippets out of their results or strike a revenue-sharing
agreement with the companies in question.

It is utterly absurd to me that a search engine is supposed to be able to
capitalise on the original content of others for free.In fair use doctrine, it
is generally considered that a service crosses the line between fair use and
piracy if it functions as a substitute. This is exactly what Google is doing.

------
pjfin123
"In 2015, Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in
six months"

As someone who has contributed content to Wikipedia and makes a (small)
monthly donation this seems like a good thing. I support Wikipedia so that
knowledge can be more easily and freely distributed and Wikipedia content is
generally licensed under CC-BY-SA. Google following the license to make
information sharing from Wikipedia more seamless (while reducing the load on
Wikipedia servers) seems like a win for everyone.

------
jawns
Putting aside the criticisms of Google for its near monopoly on search, I
don't think it's necessarily fair to say that Wikipedia "loses" a visit just
because Google happens to be able to deliver the desired information on the
search results page itself.

In many cases, visitors aren't using Google search because they want a
webpage. They're using Google search because they want an answer to a
question. Google is answering that question without them having to click
through to another site, and visitors are fine with that.

Likewise, I wouldn't say that all of the online calculator websites are
"losing" visits just because I plug 3^3 into my search bar and get 27.

Note that in some cases, Google has license agreements with the websites from
which they gather that information, so while the visitor may never land on the
source website, that source website still gets remuneration.

Besides, if you think it's bad that Google is providing content from other
sites so that visitors never have to land on the source site, just wait until
you hear about AMP ...

~~~
doublesCs
I think this is extremely shortsighted. If this were the whole story, then why
would Google be going through the effort of integrating Wikipedia data into
zero-click results? Out of charity?

No. Because big picture, those people who go to Google and leave without
clicking anything had reinforced that Google finds everything they need
easily. It makes them more likely to come back.

So Wikipedia does lose clicks to Google in the sense that it loses to Google
an opportunity to impress its brand.

Side note. 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.

~~~
scalableUnicon
If you're using DuckDuckGo, we can use the !w bang to search directly on
Wikipedia. Bangs are really handy, when you know where you'll find the
answers, and can fallback to !s (startpage) if you feel google will have
better answers for current query. This feature has been very useful for me,
especially !mdn, !cpp etc. when coding.

~~~
doublesCs
I think the correct place to have this is on the browser, not on the search
engine. I also have a cpp keyword on Firefox :-) They're getting the same
result, except mine is faster and more private.

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

~~~
rodw
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 least
this site seems to do it pretty well (IMO).

It might benefit from not re-displaying the header until you've scrolled up a
little more than it does now (again, IMO). I.e,. maybe have a threshold of a
certain number of pixels (>1) or a certain velocity of scrolling-up before the
header re-appears.

~~~
rodw
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.

~~~
mthoms
Yes, I found the page nearly unbearable and I normally like HackerNoon. This
must be a relatively new bug.

------
caymanjim
I visit Wikipedia dozens of times per day. My most-frequent Google search is
"wiki foo". The top link is almost always Wikipedia, and it's almost always
exactly what I want. I appreciate the quick facts box at the top, but I still
end up on Wikipedia. I also have a Chrome search shortcut so that I can type
e.g. "w the west wing" to go directly to the Wikipedia article, but to use
that, I need to know the exact spelling and wording of the article title,
because Wikipedia's own search engine is _horrible_. I would venture that
Google is the single largest driver of traffic to Wikipedia itself.

------
NelsonMinar
As a user, this is mostly great; I like getting information faster. (Although
Google has an alarming habit of showing information that's wrong or outdated.)

As a fan of Wikipedia and other web sites, this is disastrous. Their content
is being used by Google and they get little to no benefit for it. It's a
similar situation to what the European news agencies were saying about Google
News a few years ago. I wasn't so sympathetic to them, but I am more
sympathetic to Wikipedia.

It's not a huge problem for Wikipedia since their pages are not ad-supported.
But this kind of siphoning of user views is devastating for commercial sites.

------
aezell
Lots of comments here about the Wikimedia Foundation's finances. You can get
all that info here:
[https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wiki...](https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-
_FY18-19.pdf&page=6)

You can also explore project usage statistics here:
[https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-
projects](https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects)

------
doe88
Conscious of this issue I always take time to search (it's not always
straightforward) the wikipedia link and click to go to the wikipedia page to
somehow not endorse Google's behavior scraping data they do not own and
exposing everything in their cards (obviously what I do is certainly useless,
I still use Google Search in the first place, anyway, it just be a kind of
placebo effect for my brain to feel good).

------
coliveira
I hate the fact that Google tries to change itself every couple of years just
to make more money. The initial company proposition of giving me search
results quickly and getting out of the way was the best ever. Over time, they
instead want to keep people for as long as possible so they can present more
advertisement links.

------
nautilus12
I think the bigger issue is just that Google becomes even closer to a monopoly
on information and the information being presented here is by design surface
level. Maybe Wikipedia shouldn't care about surface level answers. They are
designed for more detailed information.

------
millette
On the other hand, wikipedia's use of nofollow makes it pretty clear they
don't want a level playing field. What makes wikipedia great is all the
references it builds on, yet those same references never get any "link juice".

~~~
zozbot234
Wikipedia uses nofollow to discourage spam edits. Google and other search
engines are free to ignore nofollow and try to assess link quality in other
ways.

~~~
millette
Editors are usually pretty quick at removing spam links. But yeah.

~~~
pjscott
At the current level of spam link posting, sure. But if getting spam links
into Wikipedia were more valuable -- say, if they stopped using rel=nofollow
-- I wonder how much the amount of incoming spam would increase.

~~~
millette
I would be happy to know they tried, or at least considered it. Maybe they
have and I'm just not aware of it. It's just something that always bugged me a
little.

------
8bitsrule
In the case of Wikipedia: If a single search result answers someone's
question, it probably wasn't all that profound.

30-volume encyclopedias are great for learning in depth, but sometimes you
just need to know something fairly trivial... more digits in pi, say.

"71% of [Freddy Mercury] searches end there, without a click to a specific
site."

I'd like to know about a lot of things in more depth, but there's only so much
time. If I'm focused on reading something that just mentions a name (it
assumes I know) I might just search it to complete that omission.

The article fails to differentiate the two search-types, and so leaves that
important question hanging.

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aritraghosh007
Rings a bell from when the EU decided to slap a fine on GOOG for swaying away
consumer traffic in favor of its own shopping platform.[1] But that was for-
profit claims and authorities were swift in action whereas this case would be
extremely interesting to follow from an online free speech advocacy POV.

1\. [https://searchengineland.com/response-eu-antitrust-ruling-
go...](https://searchengineland.com/response-eu-antitrust-ruling-google-
shopping-now-showing-ads-competing-cses-293059)

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voodootrucker
Banning advertising is the answer. Stew on that for a minute before you
downvote.

Monetary flow is the basis for our financial system and making the user not
the customer undermines the basis of why anyone does anything in a more
fundamental way then the movement from the barter system to paper money did.

[edit] random source [https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-
targeted-ad...](https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-
advertising/)

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nerf0
Wikipedia was a text gold mine waiting to be mined. They even publish data
dumps themselves that anyone can download. I doubt they had any problem with
people "stealing" their data.

Just recently I made a website that extracts information from Wikipedia and
presents it in a different way [0].

I think it's a great thing that this is possible.

[0]: [https://whataday.info/](https://whataday.info/)

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darth_avocado
Just thinking beyond One Click Traffic, I remember there was a time when
searching for a <term> would automatically have wikipedia as the top search
result, but now often, it is not even on the first page. And modifying my
search as <term wiki> would still get me wikipedia as the second result. It
may not seem like a problem, but it is.

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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.

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pcj-github
Although it is handy from a user's perspective to quickly get the answer they
want, scraping the information off Wikipedia and packaging it slightly
different has always felt like cheating to me. Seems like this behavior will
be part of the inevitable anti-trust case against Google.

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KingOfCoders
Also Wikipedia results don't show - my feeling - up as often as in the past.

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mrlonglong
"Organic"? Is this some kind of "cool" hipster thing?

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ir77
if you want to specifically have google find you a wiki article why not just
go to wiki directly, or bookmark it on your phone and create an app, or use
any of the many apps that go to wiki directly.

i don't like google but this practice seems 100% legit, someone looking for a
broad answer finds an answer immediately outside of wiki and they're happy
with it.

i personally don't want -- ever -- wiki to be #1 on my search results, if i
want a wiki answer i'll go there directly, i use search engines to find
variety of answers.

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fumar
Can you use noindex to stop Google from crawling your site but allow other
search engines?

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coronadisaster
It probably should be considered copyright infringement at some point...

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fongitosous
this is the real monopoly in western civilization. the zero click allows
google to dictate a narrative on every topic

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liveoneggs
the great irony is that wikipedia-clone sites were a massive part of the
original "panda" update

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lameiam
why is this a bad thing? Often Wikipedia is responsible for publishing the
info that google displays as the one zero-click result.

I just assumed that Wikipedia objectives include making all information easily
available. So, by that measure, Wikipedia is succeeding or so it seems.

Wikipedia is not add driven and therefore how much traffic the site attracts
really is secondary to meeting their knowledge sharing goals.

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KorfmannArno
Wikipedia is over. Mark my words.

