Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
> ...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.
And it doesn't change the fact that if you have open content then you have open content.
If you compare Wikimedias spending 5 years ago to what it is now, it has ballooned in such an excessive way if you put it in context. Wikipedia isn't providing double the value of what it was 5 years ago.
Surely it's "worth it" if you want the site to be usable by novice users. This is about optimizing for reach and intellectual diversity, not just "people who are currently adding value".
> Wikipedia isn't providing double the value of what it was 5 years ago.
Wikimedia supports other projects besides Wikipedia itself, and the value it provides has not just doubled but plausibly grown by an order of magnitude compared to its early days. Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata are hugely beneficial to the Internet community, and Wikivoyage is not far behind.
Maybe this wouldn't be the case if pages were less complicated to edit?
What does worry me is that less page views may mean less engagement in the form of checking sources, flagging problems, and making edits.
But the number of new registered users and the number of user edits are both decreasing: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects
tl;dr
The monetary cost does not really matter
1. It does contribute money, which Wikimedia does not need.
No.
At some point in an encyclopedia's lifetime, it's "complete enough" that you'll see an excess of authors. "Compiling the world's information" and, past that, "compiling current events as they happen" (with a side of "occasionally improving/updating old articles") need very different numbers of authors.
This is based off the fact that I frequently see:
- "why does X not have a Wikipedia article?"
- "this Wikipedia article is so poorly written"
And very rarely actually see someone edit it. On occasion thousands of people have agreed and hundreds of people have written comments agreeing and only two people edited.
So maybe it does some damage at the margin but overall probably doesn't hurt that much.
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.
There isn't a correct query result. Any addition necessitates removal of something else.
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
According to Google that seemed possible.
While I don't use Google much more (except the last few days to figure out if the improved quality I've seen and heard about is true) I have enough experience from the last decade to not immediately believe them.
That said, their attempts at artificial intelligence can be funny sometimes: https://erik.itland.no/more-fun-with-google-mixing-images-fr...
So much for the filter bubble were you only get interesting and relevant but not thought provoking results ;-)
In reality, Roku uses a similar and half-compatible implementation of the Chromecast standard, but it isn't supported in all the same places you can Chromecast, and you'll frequently experience hiccups like the Roku only streaming in SD or 720p instead of 1080p or 4k.
This is partially the fault of the site sharing this information, as they're not presenting this in the most clear way either. However, when Google chooses to try to automatically answer my question, they become responsible for that answer, and when that answer is misleading, it annoys me.
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.
You had me feeling bad until I came across this.
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?
Our local govt has traffic sensors for the highways - huge bucks to install / maintain etc. I can get more granular traffic that is more current from google for free. If you are going to compete with google in a data management / collection business, you are going to be playing with firm with pretty deep ability to ingest and process data.
Honestly at this point it doesn't even matter how good Bing is - we've been unconsciously trained to work with Google's algorithm in particular and they just have a de facto monopoly on the mental process a person goes through to formulate a search. Everyone's workflow everywhere will be worse and take more time if they voluntarily stop using Google, that's not what I consider a fair competitive landscape.
Seems like a recipe to have a worse product.
The argument that they're so good at what they do, they've created a monopoly, I think is very fragile.
The point of breaking up monopolies is not to make a moral statement about the company, but because we've found that monopolies are generally bad for society.
Wikipedia is CC BY-SA licensed.
On the other hand, arguably incorporation of the snippet (as the incorporation of context for other pages) is permitted in some way other than licensing (fair use?), in which case the terms of the license wouldn't apply.
I would have to think harder to have a well-formed personal opinion.
Just depends if the snippit is over the fair-use threshold I guess.
If the share-alike license allows segregating content into frames within one page then it is ok too.
Fair Use is not a concept in most jurisdictions btw.
Stratechery had a good analysis of the situation not long ago. https://stratechery.com/2019/the-google-squeeze/
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.
Google takes the excerpt which is relevant to your query, displays it to you, along with a link to the resource.
Are we upset that the excerpt is too good? That the link isn't prominent enough? Something else?
This would be comparable to write a scientific paper and only reading the headlines of each source you're using
Sure, it's convenient but it's also a bit frightening for one company to have that much power and I think that's what people are a little hesitant about.
Edit: thanks. I see Google makes it really hard to opt out of featured snippet while retaining regular search result snippet support.
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.
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
I also append forum (or site:forumname.com) if I'm looking for more in-depth review than reddit gives.
I can't echo this loud enough - I made great profit by out-ranking heavily established retail outlets for years with super spammy and terrible sites purely with correct on-page SEO and garbage 'keyword optimized' content.
I, as well, now have to append things to searches in order to get real answers. (Or start with a twitter search, depending on the topic)
Woah, thought I might be one of the few that did this. You articulated my reasoning behind it perfectly.
Five to ten years ago, the Wikipedia article for the molecule was always in the top three.
I do the same thing. I want real people's experiences and honest opinions.
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.
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.
or appending "site:news.ycombinator.com"
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.
A better approach would be to still extract data from websites like Google does (this works), but automatically attribute share (50%?) of search engine's profits proportional to the website's share of appearances in these results. This money would await the webmaster when they eventually verify domain ownership. This is fair for everyone and creates positive feedback loops.
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)
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.
__________________________
|who founded the new york times|
__________________________
> Search Results
> The New York Times/Founder
> Henry Jarvis Raymond [link to google query |Henry Jarvis Raymond|]
> The New York Times was founded as the New-York Daily Times on September 18, 1851. Founded by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond and former banker George Jones, the Times was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company.
> The New York Times - Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times]
> People also searched for...
___________________________
|"who founded the new york times"|
___________________________
> Henry Jarvis Raymond [link to google query |Henry Jarvis Raymond|]
> People also searched for...
Quotes look for exact results on Google.
I have exactly the same problem, so I hate those Wikipedia boxes. Half of the time I go to a Wiki page for some term then switch to another language (either because I searched an unknown word or because I’m searching for a translation) so the box don’t solve my need. The other half I want more info than what is displayed anyway. And I also find super confusing the position of the link, I have to search for it each and every time.
Even if they weren't, the ~$154m they have free for investments, would only gross ~$1.2m in 10 year Treasuries, or at most $5-6m in relatively higher-yield investment grade corporate bonds.
Looking at their expenses in 2019, even if you cut donation processing expenses to $0, cut awards and grants to $0, cut travel and conferences to $0, strip out depreciation and amortization, and cut their $46m payroll in half to $23m (which at a fully loaded cost of $200k/employee, is only 115 employees for one of the most widely used websites in the world), you would still be looking at annual operating expenses of ~$45m.
There is absolutely no way that Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Foundation could survive without any donations - they have $154m between cash and investments, and would need to support $45m in annual operating expenses, even with these fantastically high budget cuts. That means they'd need to net, after taxes, almost 30% return on their assets every year, just to tread water, and only after cutting their budget essentially in half.
Wikipedia has 51.1 million articles in 291 languages, is something like the 5th most visited website in the US, 10th in the world, and they manage to do this without running any ads. Can't we be thankful for the incredible human library of knowledge they've built, and chip in a few dollars if we are able, instead of complaining and telling them they should not accept donations?
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...
Hosting costs for Wikipedia are "only" $2.3m, but imagine the legal expense they have, fighting likely millions of takedown requests, malicious lawsuits, complying with local laws and regulations in China, Russia, etc, paying a team of top software engineers to handle running a top-visited site (that by the way, has almost no downtime), a security threat model that includes nation-state actors, and the responsibility that if they fail (by being hacked, or sued, or DDOSd, or whatever), they will have let humanity's library be harmed.
I just can't understand how any casual bystander can complain about Wikipedia or their funding/organizational model. If you don't like it, just don't donate money.
Wikimedia Foundation is not fighting any takedown requests. Wikimedia Foundation had exactly ten DMCA requests last year[1]. That’s a bit short of “millions” you believe it does. It does not comply with any local regulations in China or Russia, or elsewhere, because it does not operate in China or Russia (or really anywhere outside US, except caching servers in NL and Singapore). Wikipedia is actually completely blocked in China, and the fact that you did not know that signals your utter unfamiliarity with the realities of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation.
> paying a team of top software engineers to handle running a top-visited site (that by the way, has almost no downtime),
It was already a top visited site when its development team consisted of a single person, Brion Vibber. There have been very little significant development since then, and if there had been zero development since then, you’d probably not even notice.
Now, to be sure, at this scale, it needs some full time round the clock reliability engineers, but you can easily see that their headcount keeps growing, but their site and infrastructure is mostly unchanged.
[1] - https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:DMCA_2019
The second member of the development team was hired in 2006 [0].
In these ~14 years, quite a few things happened.
Three projects joined the Wikimedia galaxy: Wikiversity in 2006, Wikivoyage adopted in 2012, and frickin’ Wikidata [1] in 2012 − which has deeply reshaped many aspects of the other projects, particularly Wikipedias and Commons.
On the multimedia side of things, we got InstantCommons in 2008 [3], thumbnailing infrastructure changes in 2013, various file format support (TIFF in 2010, FLAC and WAV in 2013, WebM, 3D formats in 2018 [4]) new upload wizard in 2011 [5]. The Graph extension [6] and Wikimedia Maps [7] in 2015. Structured Data on Commons in 2019 [8]. New default skin (Vector) in 2010 [9]. Unified login in 2008 [10]. 2013 brought OAuth [11], Echo notifications [12], Lua scripting [13], VisualEditor [14]. iOS and Android apps [15]. The Wikimedia Cloud Services starting 2012 [2].
(And in terms of size: article count went from ~5M to ~50M [16] ; Commons went from 1M files to 50M files [17])
And that’s just what I’m putting together in a few minutes (Besides my own memory, I’m indebted to [18], a curated timeline up until 2013).
Of course, these may or may not justify the staff size in your book ; but I’d say discounting all of that (and the rest) as “very little significant development” is a bit pushing it. :-)
(And fairly sure that “you’d probably notice” if Wikipedia was still using good’old Monobook skin ;-þ).
[0] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Additional_... [1] https://www.wikidata.org/ [2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/ [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/InstantCommons [4] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/02/20/three-dimens... [5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Upload_Wizard [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph [7] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps [8] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data [9] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vector [10] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login [11] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:OAuth [12] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications) [13] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lua [14] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor [15] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps [16] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias/Table [17] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Milestones [18] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gpaumier/wikipedia-infogra...
But the donations don't go to the people who wrote those articles!
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011
2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...
"Volunteers also contribute in several ways to the Foundation’s wiki software: volunteer software developers add new functionality to the code base, and volunteer language specialists add to the code base by translating the wiki interface into different languages. During the year ended June30, 2019, there were 48,361 commits merged, through the efforts of approximately 447 authors/contributors, of which 9,158 commits were through the efforts of approximately 258 volunteers."
If I was one of those volunteers I'd stop.
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.
You let yourself see ads on the web?
Google is a search monopoly. Republishing search results to keep users on Google (rather than the publisher) is literally stealing content and the pageviews the content generated.
As a user, blocking programmatic ads (such as those served by ad marketplaces) is the only way to browse the web safely.
Websites are free to use affiliate links, subscriptions, donations, non-marketplace ads, or any other safe monetization strategy. I will not apologize for blocking the unsafe monetization strategies.
<a href="..."><img src="..."/></a>
Since you seem to be someone who doesn't see ads on the web, I am curious to know how you pay for the content you consume? I have come across very few non-ads options which work well. For me, subscription fatigue sets in across various video-on-demand sites and various high-quality newspapers. But for a lot of my family / friends across the globe, subscription charges are high enough that they would rather see ads.
That being said, I live with the fact that certain content creators get nothing from me, I don't feel great about it but I would never consume their content if I had to go through ads, either.
alias my-ip='dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com' $ curl icanhazip.comThis 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.
You're either free for all, or not.
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.
this is bad
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.
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...
It was actually kind of cool
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.
The only time I'm using the search as intended is for programming error queries where it's way too niche for Google to append low quality news farms / ecommerce websites. That's the only type of query I still get good results.
document.cookie = "redesign_optout=true; domain=.reddit.com; path=/; expires=Tue, 01 Jan 2030 00:00:00 GMT";
document.cookie = "listingsignupbar_dismiss=1; domain=.reddit.com; path=/; expires=Tue, 01 Jan 2030 00:00:00 GMT";https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
I loved how Google used to find high quality discussions on all sorts of niche topics (tech, gardening, science, diy...) on sites like MetaFilter and Reddit.
Now those queries seem to lead to mostly videos, low quality sites, and shopping sites.
Unfortunately it seems the problem is back, especially with Pinterest, Sfgate, the spruce, etc.
[1] https://searchengineland.com/searching-with-google-chrome-om...
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.
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.
The most-used is probably !g, which sends your query to google. For wikipedia, it's !w.
My bad. I saw the parent and forgot I'd seen keywords on Chromium. To be fair, Chrome buries this deeper than Firefox, whose payment for pushing Google is presumably smaller (and IIRC has a few built in). It's enough of a hassle to set up that I personally used bangs (there are thousands of them already set up for you) when I was stuck on Chrome on a variety of unsynced devices daily at work before the nCov.
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.
!w X
w X
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.
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.
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.
> 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 :-)
But yeah, Google has become grocery store checkout-line tabloids.
Let me block tabloids, hate sites and click farms natively and I'm sold.
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.
> 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.
For a site without ad revenue, it looks like a total win-win for them!
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.
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...
The reports are available here [2]. Looking at the most recent report here for FY18-19, the amount spent on hosting is $2.3 million. That's less than half of the "donation processing expenses"!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235
[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
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.
Google gets advertisement money out of it and is a for-profit organisation ...
Web3Torrent adds etherium micropayments to WebTorrent
Personally I dislike the attempt to scrape and show results of their original sites.
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.
> 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/...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
except for when google takes something out of context, or combines two unrelated paragraphs to convey the wrong information.
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.
In case of WMF shutting down, Wikipedia's software and data wouldn't be gone, and clones could take its place.
>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.
Also every other search engine shows some form of zero click weather. Really bad example.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
Clever or subtle UI/UX behaviors on the web are hard.
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.
You can also explore project usage statistics here: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects
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.
1. https://searchengineland.com/response-eu-antitrust-ruling-go...
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...
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.
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.
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.