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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
This sounds good in practice, but most web infrastructures don't pay per page-load. It's possible to do this to some extent, but typically, a number of servers sit un-utilized, but paid for nonetheless.
Also, Google displays their own ads in these results, so it's not like visitors who may go to a site with ads are somehow relieved of this annoyance by using Google.
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.
> 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
There's a difference between organizing the world's information, and becoming the source of the world's information. Traditionally Google has been a card catalog—you want to find something, they'll tell you where to find it. Now they're trying to become the encyclopedia.
> that's better for everybody, including Wikimedia who don't have to pay to serve the query
If you're a site that makes money via serving webpages, then preventing you from serving those web pages costs money, not saves money.
The mere existence of some site that serves an answer should not prevent another site from simply giving the answer itself, instead of a referral to the other place.
It's not just that Google is giving an answer—it's that Google is taking the other site's answer displaying that. So the other site gets no ad revenue for producing the answer, and the reader gets none of the surrounding context, nor do they gain any familiarity with or trust of the actual source.
What's the underlying principle that requires one to proxy questions through to the place where one originally learned the answer? If I ask you "how far is it from here to Chicago" are you going to just tell me, or are you going to tell me that I can find out in the Rand McNally Deluxe Road Atlas 2016?
The name of the Mayor of Johannesburg, or the atomic mass of nitrogen, are not yours to appropriate. You have no claim on these facts, even if they are written down on your web page.
The atomic mass of Nitrogen? No. But, plenty of the information that they share is information that others control, and if not the information, definitely the explicit wording of it.
It is a matter of ethics, good manners, etc. If I know the distance I will tell you - this is OK. If I do not, look it up on maps and tell you as if I knew first hand without citing the source then it is another story. Manners maketh men, even though some feel that on Internet we are all dogs.
> You are, I submit, forcing a distinction because you wish it rather than because it makes sense.
I'm forcing a distinction, because in one case they work with the companies that they index, and in the other case they work against those companies, by stealing their information and displaying it with their own ads.
What they do is connect users to what they want to see. Your persistent attempts to force a distinction have the distinctive air of someone whose livelihood depends on said distinction.
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.
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.
Is anyone else getting the feeling that Google is becoming a hostile platform for other businesses?