Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

https://hackernoon.com/how-wikipedia-lost-3-billion-organic-search-visits-to-google-in-2019-qz6630u6

by caution • 6 years ago

435 285 6 years ago

Monory• 6 years ago

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!

9nGQluzmnq3M• 6 years ago

Exactly. Wikipedia's content is CC-licensed precisely to allow reuse of all kinds, including this.

bootloop• 6 years ago

I believe it's a big problem that people don't know anymore where their "information" comes from (and who paid for it).

onion2k• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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...

zozbot2346• 6 years ago

AIUI, Google does give proper credit to Wikipedia whenever it's reasonable to do so. Technically they don't even need to do this for a lot of basic machine-readable information that Wikidata is making available via CC0.

bzb32• 6 years ago

And Wikipedia gets its information from their editors. When are the editors getting their fair share of the money? :')

idoby2• 6 years ago

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)

garyclarke27• 6 years ago

I would rather Wikipedia took some advertising, rather than it’s begging pop ups which have become more intrusive and irritating recently.

xxs• 6 years ago

They are less likely to contribute, explore more, or check the veracity of the info. Google routinely shows disputed info in their short excerpts.

Personally I dislike the attempt to scrape and show results of their original sites.

perfectstorm• 6 years ago

people learn stuff even faster

I agree with the faster part but these snippets Google shows often times lacks context and other miscellaneous information along with deep links to many other great articles.

armagon• 6 years ago

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.

ysavir2• 6 years ago

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.

marcinzm3• 6 years ago

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.

CobsterLock• 6 years ago

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).

dawnerd3• 6 years ago

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.

fillipvt2• 6 years ago

Does the banner asking for donations count as ads? If we assume that, wouldn't this hurt their ability to keep their servers running?

jawns• 6 years ago

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 ...

zozbot2346• 6 years ago

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.

LunaSea2• 6 years ago

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

basch• 6 years ago

I dont believe it the case that Google is returning the correct info though, and I believe attributing this primarily to zeroclick is wrong.

As the latter part of the article says, for a while now, google has filled the top of the page with tangently related videos, places to buy music, and other media, when all I wanted was the wikipedia article. They seem to have demoted wikipedia off the first page of many search phrases. I have to search wiki directly or add wikipedia as a search term to bring it back.

Google is not saving clicks, they are making me search twice.

doublesCs5• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

blakesterz• 6 years ago

"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.

gtirloni• 6 years ago

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

rodw3• 6 years ago

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.

rodw3• 6 years ago

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.

colmvp• 6 years ago

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.

realusername2• 6 years ago

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.

MiroF2• 6 years ago

At this point, I basically have to append "reddit" to every search if I want to get quality answers.

dawnerd3• 6 years ago

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.

doublesCs5• 6 years ago

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.

clairity• 6 years ago

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.

boogies8• 6 years ago

This, but also, when you're stuck on Chromium, change the default search to DuckDuckGo or Searx and use !w or !wp to search Wikipedia (and !s !sp if you want Google results for some reason, and !g or !go if you want Google results with a filter bubble).

ma2rten• 6 years ago

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

oefrha4• 6 years ago

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...

Noumenon72• 6 years ago

Once you get used to keyword searches, here are some other handy ones. It's like having a CLI to the Internet.

gm Google Maps

t thesaurus.com

u YouTube (for music)

pron for porn (after setting up a Google custom search engine that searches your favorite tube sites -- https://developers.google.com/custom-search)

gi for Google Images

r for Reddit (the site search has gotten better -- I used to use Google "site:reddit.com %s" instead).

My only problem with these is somehow the Wayback Machine doesn't work when I put https://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?url=%s.

theandrewbailey• 6 years ago

If DDG is your default search, use the Wikipedia searchbang[0].

    !w X

will directly search Wikipedia for X.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang

_emacsomancer_• 6 years ago

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.

unethical_ban• 6 years ago

Use duckduckgo and type "!w blah" to go straight to the article for blah.

pickdenis• 6 years ago

Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of articles from dubious sources and whereas DDG will pull Wikipedia articles closer to the top.

In my (limited) experience, I dislike using DDG because it gets confused by less important words in the search query. For example, for "who coined the term faux pas" Google simply gives a bunch of links to webpages that define and elucidate the term "faux pas". DDG, however, gives a wide variety of results, many being totally irrelevant. The first article is on parapraxis, the second is the wiki article for microaggression (?).

http://archive.is/jv0qd (notice how DDG bolds the phrase "coined the term" in the first link, thinking that this is the relevant part of the query).

It's stuff like this that will prevent DDG from catching on with the general population who have been spoiled by Google.

danuker• 6 years ago

Is Google breaking the "Attribution" requirement of CC-BY-SA?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

liveoneggs• 6 years ago

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

NelsonMinar• 6 years ago

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.

zpeti• 6 years ago

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.

zozbot2346• 6 years ago

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.

sjwright3• 6 years ago

How is YouTube not a competitor to Wikipedia? Both are community powered content. They would be directly competing on many major search terms. The fact that the editorial standards and media formats are different is beside the point.

monodot• 6 years ago

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.

crazygringo2• 6 years ago

...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.

moneywoes• 6 years ago

Doesn't less page views also mean less donations?

UncleMeat• 6 years ago

That's possible, but not the argument being made here. This is a hypothetical loss.

And it doesn't change the fact that if you have open content then you have open content.

thesimon• 6 years ago

Don't they have more than enough money already?

marcinzm3• 6 years ago

The Wikimedia Foundation has a mission of, in part, disseminating information. It's mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible." If the loss in donations allows for their mission to be done more efficiently then that's a net gain.

Cthulhu_2• 6 years ago

Possible, but Google's also donating to Wikipedia itself: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...

nxpnsv• 6 years ago

Maybe. Maybe not.

boogies8• 6 years ago

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.

toohotatopic• 6 years ago

Or worse: less active users who edit content.

Up until now, an edit was one click away. Now, it's not only one more click away but wikipedia has no way to communicate that editing the result is possible at all.

Gunax• 6 years ago

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.

noiv• 6 years ago

Check out search settings allowing up to 100 hits per page.

Swizec• 6 years ago

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

gabbagandalf420• 6 years ago

Could you give an exact example?

thayne2• 6 years ago

wikipedia is probably not the best site to use for that argument for the reasons you listed. But the article also mentions weather.com, which is ad-supported, and zero-click answers can come from other ad-supported sites as well.

bawolff• 6 years ago

I agree its not stealing (the mission is to collect and disseminate knowledgge, not to drive page hits), but the main workflow to get new users is somewhat disrupted by more queries being answered by google.

nend• 6 years ago

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.

troughway• 6 years ago

Yelp

You had me feeling bad until I came across this.

jgalt212• 6 years ago

But in the long term

In long term, there won't be free content for Google to scrape and display in search results knowledge graphs as ad supported / free content businesses shut down. Of course, google can create its own content and does so to feed the knowledge graphs, but it's way more expensive to do so. And the math might not be worth it for google manufacture from scratch all this content.

So then folks won't use google, but will they go direct to Yelp 2030? Will there be Yelp 2030?

geeostation• 6 years ago

well, it shouldn't be "legal" for one or cartel corporation to mediate between content/data and its users. its downright dystopian.

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

Those businesses should license their content differently, then.

Wikipedia is CC BY-SA licensed.

xapata• 6 years ago

At the moment, it's good for users, as with most increases in competition. Google's hotel search and flight search user interfaces are superior to those provided by many of the task-specific businesses.

Stratechery had a good analysis of the situation not long ago. https://stratechery.com/2019/the-google-squeeze/

alex_young2• 6 years ago

Any site can control indexing through robots.txt.

You either want this information in the search engine or you don't.

Don't like one of the indexers? Tell it not to index you.

edw• 6 years ago

If the problem is not that Google is (not) stealing Wikipedia’s clicks but instead is stealing the clicks —- and, more accurately, content — of other, for profit, sites then why go with that headline? Because it’s good clickbait.

I’m pretty sympathetic to the plights of Weather.com, Genius.com, Zagats (oops, Google bought them and then resold them), Yelp, and whomever else Google is appropriating non-public domain and non-Creative Commons content from. But that’s a story that’s already been told, so the site decided to find a heart-string tugging yet intellectually-dishonest angle.

puranjay• 6 years ago

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

EGreg• 6 years ago

So once again, the ownerless open model beats the closed one. Boo hoo.

ChuckMcM• 6 years ago

Exactly, take "Fastsecret" for example, if you go to the web site and look up calories for something you often get the result in a one box from this site. However if you go to the site you see that they are really trying to get app conversions for their app. As conversions are typically a percentage of page visits, all of those page visits are now "toast" so to speak.

chris_f• 6 years ago

There is an alternative and IMO more sustainable model for a search engine, specifically for non-organic results (i.e. instant type answers). It is to create connections with each underlying data provider, and based on the search query provide results from their sites in accordance with their display/usage terms.

It also provides the advantage of being able to curate the sources to provide higher quality for niche search topics. [0]

I have been working on a search engine that works this exact way. The challenge is identifying and integrating the data sources for all the potential search intents.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=hiking+in+boston

manigandham• 6 years ago

True but part of it is good competition. Google Flights is 100x better than any other flight search site.

the_duke• 6 years ago

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 instead of it being an intuitive click and clear on first sight, especially on mobile.

WRT to the results, they do indeed seem to appear now, but often not in the first or second position. (I do remember that not being the case previously, but I admittedly might be mistaken)

crazygringo2• 6 years ago

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 confusing the short excerpts (with have a clear, obvious Wikipedia link) with Google's Knowledge Graph results, which is a different thing and is based on many different sources.

oefrha4• 6 years ago

That’s just false, showing the info box does not remove the link from itemized search results. If a Wikipedia link is nowhere to be found, that’s indication that the info box isn’t info from Wikipedia in the first place (e.g. movies, certain persons). Same goes for answer snippets.

batmansmk• 6 years ago

Reducing traffic to Wikipedia reduces donations, contributions, brand awareness. Grabbing Wikipedia's added value is like stealing candies from a child.

xyzzyz2• 6 years ago

Wikipedia does not need any donations. If they Wikimedia Foundation puts its cash reserves into safe low yield investments, it’ll be able to run Wikipedia for decades. Of course, it won’t pay for salaries of the current WMF employees, but Wikipedia does only need a few of them.

TeMPOraL2• 6 years ago

Only if somehow Google disproportionally captured would-be donors. Otherwise, assuming linear scaling, this changes nothing - and since things on the web tend to grow costs sublinearly, it technically makes Wikipedia ahead in donations/costs.

onetimemanytime• 6 years ago

semantics...if I read an article on Wiki I might actually send them $50 too. That sustains Wikipedia

trianglem• 6 years ago

This line of thinking only works in the case of a non profit like Wikipedia. What about the countless other for profit sites that are taking a hit because of AMP?

coding123• 6 years ago

Well, let's ask Wikimedia if it's good or not, because they're the ones affected.

wnevets• 6 years ago

I personally love it when my search results just give me the answer I'm looking for

This is one of the things I love about google as a user. Googling "what is my ip" or "how many inches in a meter" used to require you to visit some random website filled to the brim with ads.

ebg13• 6 years ago

filled to the brim with ads

You let yourself see ads on the web?

psexec• 6 years ago

what is my ip

    alias my-ip='dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com'

buboard2• 6 years ago

filled to the brim with ads.

This was the social contract of the web. You give google free content , they give you back money through adsense. Google broke it, and went overly greedy.

If enough websites band together (incl. wikipedia), they could boycott google and force it to pay them per search click or sth. It's only fair . Google is exploiting a system in their own advantage and to the detriment of others. This is no longer win-win.

georgeecollins2• 6 years ago

Google is selling ads against free content created in Wikipedia, and Wikipedia sees none of that. That isn't fair to Wikipedia and it would be catastrophic for many for-profit websites.

reaperducer2• 6 years ago

Can't Wikipedia just change its terms of service or licensing if it thinks this is a problem?

You're either free for all, or not.

ProAm• 6 years ago

But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic.

it would be nice if this was a two-party agreement. Google is forcible changing or dictating any potential business model changes Wikipedia might want to make.

buboard2• 6 years ago

wikipedia is also losing editors and fact-checkers. It also degrades its image -- why would i contribute my time so that google exploits it to become richer?

this is bad

chimen• 6 years ago

Wikipedia relies on donations. With 0-click the visitor never lands on the page and I'm sure that also impacts the results of their campaign.

48309248302• 6 years ago

Do you think that Wikipedia doesn't want traffic? When people land on Wikipedia it creates brand recognition and the opportunity for them to ask for support from those visitors, which is what keeps Wikipedia going. Some of those users will edit pages while they are there.

What Google is doing is terrible, especially for smaller sites. Those sites depend on traffic to survive.

AMP makes things even worse, because now the visitors never actually go to the website's own independent servers, even if "the content" loads, and Google dictates how the sites have to be built. Web publishers are in the process of losing control of their websites and independence.

pcmaffey• 6 years ago

Google is monetizing Wikipedia's content. Even if that content is "free", selling it to advertisers counts as stealing.

putlake• 6 years ago

This is really quite short-sighted. Sure, customers like this in the short term. But this hurts the website owner.

e.g. 1: You are a restaurant or retailer and your potential customers search Google for your hours of operation or phone number. Google shows them the answer so they never come to your site. So they don't see that you have a free delivery offer during the Covid crisis. And you can't market to them via any campaign that retargets visitors to your site.

e.g. 2: You are a publisher that makes money from ads, like say CelebrityNetWorth [1]. Google steals your content and you never get the traffic you'd like to monetize. This is HN so there will be scorn for the ad-fueled business model. But they serve a need. It's one thing for the market to punish ad-monetized sites, it's quite another for Google to steal from them.

e.g. 3: You are Wikipedia. While your content is free, you rely on community contributions to grow. If someone never visits your site, they don't learn about your mission, don't learn that they can contribute. Your corpus stagnates.

The only reason Google gets away with this is because they are stealing pennies from millions of people rather than millions from a single entity. Indie content creators do not have the resources to fight Google on this, because G offers them an all-or-nothing option[2]: you can either be in Google search results or not. And no one can afford not to be.

Google has been so emboldened that they now change the content and user experience _on the website_.[3] Consumers click through to your site and Google will scroll them to a specific section, and highlight that in yellow. Not only does Google control who gets to your site via the search monopoly, but they steal your content, and control how people experience _your_ site.

[1] https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... [2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en [3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/4/21280115/google-search-eng...

m463• 6 years ago

do you remember when amazon had it's own wikipedia redirector? It was something like www.amazon.com/wikipedia/<rest-of-url> and any book that would appear as an ISBN would be clickable to the book page on amazon for purchase.

It was actually kind of cool

nwienert• 6 years ago

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.

ciarannolan• 6 years ago

Google results lately are absolute garbage without an ad blocker, and just regular garbage with one.

With no ad blocker, for any query I run, ads fill the whole screen when I search. I have to scroll down to see the first normal result.

nisa• 6 years ago

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.

azangru• 6 years ago

If you’re shopping
If you’re looking for anything scientific
If you’re searching for news

Good thing I am using it to search for code snippets and error messages then :-)

carapace• 6 years ago

Switched to DDG ages ago. I was shocked when I realized "I don't use Google to google."

But yeah, Google has become grocery store checkout-line tabloids.

ratfaced-guy• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

deckard1• 6 years ago

It'd be a bit ironic if we go back towards curated search engines (i.e. catalogs of the 1990s) due to the algorithms making a mess of it.

There was something magical about diving into a hierarchy of arbitrary classification and finding links to new sites you never knew existed.

Nowadays I never discover new gems on Google. Only Pinterest/Quora/fake-Instagram junk.

boogies8• 6 years ago

Are you looking for https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ ?

Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity.
Get started with searx by using one of the Searx-instances. If you don’t trust anyone, you can set up your own, see Installation.

lameiam• 6 years ago

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.

pjfin123• 6 years ago

"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.

coliveira• 6 years ago

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.

lawrenceyan• 6 years ago

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.

nautilus12• 6 years ago

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.

gundmc• 6 years ago

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...

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

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

KorfmannArno3• 6 years ago

Wikipedia is over. Mark my words.

fumar• 6 years ago

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

millette4• 6 years ago

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".

zozbot2346• 6 years ago

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.

millette4• 6 years ago

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

xnx• 6 years ago

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?

casefields• 6 years ago

Then, Cloudfare's DDos protection, reCaptcha, and a bunch of other new nuisances, take it back with extra on top.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

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.

coronadisaster• 6 years ago

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

doe88• 6 years ago

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).

KingOfCoders• 6 years ago

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

ibudiallo• 6 years ago

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

fillipvt2• 6 years ago

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

ir77• 6 years ago

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.

caymanjim• 6 years ago

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.

darth_avocado• 6 years ago

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.

aezell• 6 years ago

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...

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

aritraghosh007• 6 years ago

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...

mundo• 6 years ago

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

tags:

keyword: wp

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

Aachen• 6 years ago

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.

fongitosous• 6 years ago

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

mrlonglong• 6 years ago

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

pcj-github• 6 years ago

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.

nerf0• 6 years ago

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/

8bitsrule• 6 years ago

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.

voodootrucker• 6 years ago

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...

Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

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