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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> ...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.

View on HN

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.

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

> Google has also been pushing sites that do on-page SEO right heavily in the SERPs.

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)

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

Woah, thought I might be one of the few that did this. You articulated my reasoning behind it perfectly.

I often have to specifically search for a Wikipedia article in Google to get the result for it. For example, if I search for a pharmaceutical molecule, I will get pages of "health line" type pages listing side effects and uses.

Five to ten years ago, the Wikipedia article for the molecule was always in the top three.

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

I do the same thing. I want real people's experiences and honest opinions.

If it's tech-related or even music, history, or philosopy-related, I'll append site:ycombinator.com to my DDG search queries. Unfortunately, it's not just Google search that's full of SEO-optimised crap.

DDG's actually worse in many ways. I've just switched back from it to Google because most times I was prepending my searches with !g or rerunning them due to frustration at the crappy results.

Example: in the midst of my house renovation my Hisense TV remote has gone walkabout. After several months of having no idea where it is (I figured it would just turn up - I mean, it has to be in here somewhere, right?), I decided to order a replacement. Amazon is full of knock-offs, but turns out Hisense sell remotes directly.

So I type "Hisense" into DDG and it's the top result, but it's the Chinese site, and I can't figure out how to get to the UK site. The UK site isn't even on the first page of results either. I rerun the search with Google and the Hisense UK site is the top result, and I'm able to quickly find replacement remotes.

Did you have the UK switch on? The top result for me is the UK site: https://imgur.com/5F7nMRP

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

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

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

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

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

I had an idea last night for a browser extension that hides SEO chaff from search engine results. I don't have much programming experience so who knows if I'll work on this or not though.

I also append forum (or site:forumname.com) if I'm looking for more in-depth review than reddit gives.

Yep. Whenever google autocompletes to "... reddit" I end up choosing that option, because it foretells that the results are going to be crap if I don't.

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

or appending "site:news.ycombinator.com"

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/

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

This is a step in a good direction but is hard to scale.

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.

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

The "one" part is out fault for not using Bing, but isn't "mediating content" between users and websites essentially the premise of a search engine?

Lots of companies reached monopoly status because they were simply better than the competition.

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.

Is it really though? Bing has been consistently worse than Google over the years. Maybe our definition of vendor lock-in needs to change.

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.

So we think Google is doing a good job, but we also want to dictate to them how they do it?

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.

I agree. Google perf is indeed better ...and still use Bing (via Ecosia) for 90% of request

https://www.ecosia.org/

The complaint is not that content is being mediated, but that it is one company or cartel that is doing the mediating.

Those businesses should license their content differently, then.

Wikipedia is CC BY-SA licensed.

Does google "share alike" the rest of the results page? Or is embedding considered enough separation to not need to share alike?

I don't think Google claims any copyright on the Wikipedia snippets. You can share them just like you can share the original. They also give a link back to the source and clearly mark them as Wikipedia content. What more do you think that they should do to satisfy the license terms?

Arguably the entire generated page is a derived work, in which case the whole page should be CC-BY-SA not merely the snippet.

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.

> What more do you think that they should do to satisfy the license terms?

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.

Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the creative commons licenses. They allow all kinds of use, as long as (in the case of BY-SA) you mention the original author and share derivative works under the same license.

Fair Use is not a concept in most jurisdictions btw.

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.

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

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.

> 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?

Google's ad network provides a lot of support to these "free" content options. Google is not bad at creating own content, the amount of data for example they can slurp up from phones running google maps is pretty darn high.

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.

>Yelp

You had me feeling bad until I came across this.

If they do it to Yelp, imagine how bad it is for Yelp's less awful competitors. You can't ignore the iceberg just because the tip is a jerk.

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

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.

How about if you want the information in a search engine, but you would prefer that the "search engine" didn't just nick the contents and display it on their site, rather than sending searchers to yours?

Yo can tell google (and any other respectable search engine) not to include snippetsin results, either via robots.txt or with meta elements.

How?

Edit: thanks. I see Google makes it really hard to opt out of featured snippet while retaining regular search result snippet support.

I didn't see anything about the robots.txt approach, but this support page discusses the meta tag method.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en

https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_t...

Isn't this what a search engine is?

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?

In a sense, yes, the engine is too good. If you continue this trend, eventually nobody will have a reason to leave Google because anytime you search for anything Google will have the answer to everything.

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.

Google should help the users choose whether to visit the site in question or not, but not flat-out remove the need as everything is directly presented in Google. Often the sentences Google shows in the card excerpts are lacking in context, but you wouldn't know without visiting the site.

This would be comparable to write a scientific paper and only reading the headlines of each source you're using

I’m not sure if you’re being dense on purpose. They are not just excerpt. They are taking full on paragraph of content. We aren’t talking of the meta description here. It’s taking so much content that you don’t need to click anymore. Google is now the encyclopedia, with content they did not create.

Then allow it only to search engines where you have an agreement, or at least they have provided a public commitment, as to how they will present information that aligns with your preferences. You don't have to use “User-agent: *” for your rules.

This is a great argument when the company in question isn't a monopoly.

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

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.

I have to object to this. Wikimedia as of their audited 2019 financial statements (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...) already has ~$53m in short term investments, leaving ~$101m in "cash and cash equivalents", which notably often includes Treasury bonds, CDs, etc, anyways. So they are likely already investing all of their cash into safe, low-yield investments already.

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?

On the flip side, the website hosting only costs $2.3 million annually [0] and the content creators work for free. Even if the Wikimedia Foundation could not survive like that, a lean Wikipedia operation clearly could.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...

I disagree. There is no such thing as a "lean" site that is as popular as Wikipedia (top 5-10 US depending on the day). I believe they are likely the leanest website in the Alexa top 30. The only site that I see that is leaner in the top rankings is Craigslist, currently at #38 in America, and Craigslist is a famously, fantastically, uniquely lean site (in some people's opinions, even to a fault).

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.

> but imagine the legal expense they have, fighting likely millions of takedown requests, malicious lawsuits, complying with local laws and regulations in China, Russia

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

> 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 […].

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...

>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?

But the donations don't go to the people who wrote those articles!

I'm personally very thankful for the library of knowledge that is Wikipedia. For a lot of searches on technical matters I usually bypass Google and go directly to Wikipedia. I find that you can often use the references and links to bypass the Ad infested web to some extent.

The parent poster is correct. WMF spends about US$2m on hosting annually (out of $100m+ in annual donations), and burns almost $90m per year, as if it were some kind of VC-funded startup.[1][2] Spending $46m on salaries is ridiculous when almost all of the work is done by unpaid volunteers.[2]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011

2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...

To quote from that financial statement:

"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.

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.

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)

> 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.

I think they're talking about the Knowledgegraph, assuming Knowledgegraph is the content in the right column. If so, they're right. The discoverability of wikipedia in that thing is poor and it's aggravating when they bury the one link I want inside text content so it's a moving target on the page in a small font.

Fascinating, quoting the query changes results. Pipes represent the search field:

__________________________

|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...

That's because quoting searches has a completely different meaning...

Quotes look for exact results on Google.

> 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.

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.

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.

I wonder if there are multiple UIs in play. I just went and searched for some examples and the box I'm seeing today is fine, but I swear I've had a box in the past where the Wikipedia link was small, buried, and hard to find. When I say hard, I mean it takes a few seconds, but the idea is I have to go hunting for it while Google tries to entice me to click something else which isn't what I want.

I've absolutely encountered this as well - maybe on mobile?

> 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.

> 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.

> what is my ip

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

Awesome. Now try it at a client's off-site location with hardware and terminal locked down by someone else's IT department while you're trying to troubleshoot their connection.

Or your mobile device…

is this a serious comment? it reads like satire of an HN comment

I for one found this very useful

Sure, it's a good command to know, but completely apropos of nothing. A command line alias is not at all an alternative to typing "what's my IP" into google, something that even my mom could do.

Easier:

    $ curl icanhazip.com

> filled to the brim with ads

You let yourself see ads on the web?

You don't have to see ads to not want to visit places that inundate others with them. Also, having an ad blocker should not give you the false impression that you aren't seeing ads on the web.

Yes, I do because I prefer compensating content creators, because otherwise we will not have many of those. If some website has shitty ads (blinking banners, auto-playing videos, malware etc), I just avoid those sites altogether.

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.

I try my best to contribute for things I care about. I'll send the occaisionally donation into the guardian, ETF, Patron for a youtuber, wikipedia, or whatever. I do have a couple subscriptions like for Spotify or the economist, but otherwise I try to give to stick to donations whenever I feel like I have money to burn.

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.

Its funny to note that many people here complain about Google preventing page views, but have no restraint in doing the same by blocking ads. Pot meet kettle...

Blocking ads doesn't prevent page views, it prevents viewing garbage along with the pages.

These are not comparable practices.

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.

Specifically, we already know how to display ads:

  <a href="..."><img src="..."/></a>

Anything which uses javascript to display ads is by definition malware, and should be treated accordingly.

Doesn't less page views also mean less donations?

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.

Addendum: their revenue was actually following an upward trend as of their last report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report#K...

But the number of new registered users and the number of user edits are both decreasing: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects

Couldn't it be said Wikipedia is basically complete? Which would explain the declining number of edits

A comprehensive encyclopedia is never complete.

Never is a very, very long time.

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.

> Couldn't it be said Wikipedia is basically complete?

No.

Serving pages to logged-in users is very costly to Wikimedia. Edits are even more costly.

What I'm trying to communicate is that Wikimedia has challenges, possibly exacerbated by Google's behaviour, but the challenges are not money. Wikimedia is not a for-profit corporation, it's a non-profit with a mission to collect and distribute knowledge. Google distributes pieces of that knowledge, but does not contribute to the collection of new knowledge.¹ Wikimedia has all the money it needs, and is getting more money from more people all the time. It does not have all the contributions it needs in the form of new knowledge, and by many measures the new knowledge it gets is decreasing.

tl;dr

The monetary cost does not really matter

1. It does contribute money, which Wikimedia does not need.

the decreasing number of edits likely has more to do with the obnoxious edit policies and power users who will stamp down on any new users trying to edit, rather than a few less pageviews directed from google search results.

I'm pretty confident only a small fraction of people edit anyway and those who would only need a few encounters to start becoming editors.

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.

There must be a bigger movement around contributing to Wikipedia, including financial rewards.

I'm pretty sure financial incentives are the exact opposite of what Wikipedia needs.

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.

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

This is just a smokescreen. If we assume, very conservatively, that Wikipedia content outright satisfies 1% of Google searches (through info boxes, Wikipedia widget etc), thats would be worth 1% of $100bn+ of revenue Google generates from search = $1bn. Even if a fair thing to do would be to split that revenue, Wikipedia should still get $500mn in that arrangement. So a $2mn donation is just a smokescreen. Google is extracting extraordinary value from Wikipedia, and just because it is 'free' doesn't mean it shouldn't fairly give back.

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.

Wikipedia's editing software also makes editing very difficult.

Do you refer to the markup jungle, or the VisualEditor? Because from the outside, the new editor looks fantastic, and honestly makes me want to self-host MediaWiki again.

We use MediaWiki internally, still love it! Welcome back!

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.

Don't they have more than enough money already?

They surely would if they weren’t needlessly adding terrible UX “features”

Not to justify wasting money, but the questionable UX features are a relatively small part of the massive cash fire that is the WMF. Also, while there have been some large and costly failures (Visual Editor), UX features are one of the few areas where I think that the WMF could realistically advance their purpose: increasing engagement with the encyclopedia. Features like Page Previews can be very helpful. There are a number of possible UX tweaks to improve reading and editing the encyclopedia, and these could all be helpful to the long term health of the encyclopedia (assuming they don't cut into the budget for servers).

As a casual Wikipedia editor, I enjoy using the visual editor :(

I'm honestly glad to hear that. The main point of the Visual Editor was to make editing Wikipedia easier and more inclusive. The research suggests that it did not really succeed in achieving these goals. This result is a little surprising to me, but there are probably bigger barriers to editing wikipedia than a markup language. For some people the visual editor is great, and I think that as a long term investment it was a good idea (the benefit could have been large) even though it did not pan out. The problem is that the cost and time spent creating it was very high, and the WMF foundation has a lousy track record executing these projects effectively.

Interested. What UX "features" are you referring to?

VisualEditor is not worth it. It's being touted as a massive improvement, but which editors is it really catering too? Most valuable content in Wikipedia is written by a minority! By spending too much money on VisualEditor, you're optimizing for people who are barely adding value anyway! The money could have been spent on an interactive markup tutorial instead. That would be way cheaper, because it has a linear flow. It would also have been easier because it isn't as performance critical, as it doesn't need to load millions of time per day, only as part of the onboarding process.

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.

> VisualEditor is not worth it.

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.

> Most valuable content in Wikipedia is written by a minority! By spending too much money on VisualEditor, you're optimizing for people who are barely adding value anyway!

Maybe this wouldn't be the case if pages were less complicated to edit?

Maybe. Maybe not.

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.

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

> 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

Could you give an exact example?

I have one from yesterday where I tried to figure out if I could connect Files on my iOS to a webdav server.

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 ;-)

Here's an example where the results seem to imply that I can "Chromecast to my Roku". https://i.imgur.com/hVHKAKW.png

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.

Here's one I ran into last year.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECqxWUJU8AA28sQ?format=png

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?

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

How would changing there terms of service prevent Google from doing this? If that worked, don't you think Yelp would do that?

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.

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

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