22 ms·

Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019

435 points by caution 6y ago

Monory 6y ago
Shouldn't Wikimedia Foundation be grateful for that? Their goal is met — people learn stuff even faster, and also they incur less server costs, because Google eats them. For a site without ad revenue, it looks like a total win-win for them!
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  Exactly. Wikipedia's content is CC-licensed precisely to allow reuse of all kinds, including this.
- bootloop 6y ago
  I believe it's a big problem that people don't know anymore where their "information" comes from (and who paid for it).
- onion2k 6y ago
  People perceive that they can get the information for free from Google, so they're a lot less likely to donate to Wikipedia even though that's where Google gets the information from. Imagine a future where Wikipedia finally runs out of money after trying bigger and bigger donation banners and has to stop providing the service. As users expect to see the sidebar in Google's search results pages Google would hoover up all the data and bring control of it in-house, and we would only see whichever facts Google chooses for us. I'm not sure that would be a good thing.
  - tantalor 6y ago
    Google, as well as many other companies, has long relied on Wikipedia for its content. Now, Google and Google.org are giving back. Google.org President Jacquelline Fuller today announced a $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment. An additional $1.1 million donation went to the Wikimedia Foundation, courtesy of a campaign where Google employees decided where to direct Google’s donation dollars. https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-million-to-wikipedias-parent-org/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...
    - matteuan 6y ago
      Wikipedia spends more than that only for "Donation processing expenses". Of course it is a nice contribution but, in my opinion, very small if compared to the huge value that Google is able to get for free. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...
      - sjwright 6y ago
        I was going to be even more cynical and say that 3 million sounds absolutely pathetic relative to the scale of both entities, and given how important it is to the quality of Google’s search results.
        xigency 6y ago
        I would be even more cynical and say that $3 million is more than enough to cover all of Wikipedia's expenses and that the rest is bureaucratic fluff. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3112115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3112115
        xigency 6y ago
        To add to my own comment, this [1] was the submission that I originally had in mind. It was in the 2007-2008 operating year that Wikipedia's expenses crossed the $3 million threshold. In 2015-2016 the expenses were >$65 million. In 2019, they were $91 million. Remember that the content creators work for free. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
    - pydry 6y ago
      I remember when Wikipedia used to warn against donations from Google and the like and running ads because even if it didn't undermine their independence it would at the very least undermine the perception of their independence. Looks like they're ok with it now though. I suspect it won't be too long before they get used to this largesse and won't want to do anything that might jeapoardize it.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    AIUI, Google does give proper credit to Wikipedia whenever it's reasonable to do so. Technically they don't even need to do this for a lot of basic machine-readable information that Wikidata is making available via CC0.
  - bzb3 6y ago
    And Wikipedia gets its information from their editors. When are the editors getting their fair share of the money? :')
    - LunaSea 6y ago
      Wikipedia is a non-profit and money goes to servers and wages for a few staff members. Google gets advertisement money out of it and is a for-profit organisation ...
      - zozbot234 6y ago
        Actually, the organization behind Wikipedia has way more than "a few" staff members. There's been a perceived problem with excessive spending growth for many years now although to be fair, the increased spending has also allowed for compelling new features, projects, and avenues of editor support. (Stuff like the Visual editor, newer successful projects like Wikivoyage and Wikidata, initiatives to support article-editing in educational and scholarly settings, large-scale contests to support the editing community, etc. etc. just wouln't exist absent that revenue growth.)
  - idoby 6y ago
    I imagine a future where a project like wikipedia is replicated endlessly by willing users on an IPFS-like network, where people can donate CPU, storage and bandwidth instead of money to pay for a centralized server, simply by running something like ipfs pin wikipedia (or a subset)
    - deleted 6y ago
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    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      Sounds kind of like a newsgroup, with every client also being a server. I think torrents can be dynamically updated now.[1][2] Maybe we already have the tools we need, we just haven’t put all the pieces together yet. [1] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html [2] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
      - idoby 6y ago
        That's right. We need to start thinking decentralized. Instead of using DNS to find a server and HTTP to get the content from it, we should switch to a decentralized lookup of the data itself, sourced from wherever the network can serve it. I don't mind getting one wiki page from Peter and another from Paul.
        aspenmayer 6y ago
        I think IPFS and Filecoin could solve these problems and keep attribution and data integrity intact. Would be nice to have the privacy of monero or another more private coin to facilitate subscription functionality with built in micropayments.
        aspenmayer 6y ago
        Update on this front: Web3Torrent adds etherium micropayments to WebTorrent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23602008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23602008 https://blog.statechannels.org/introducing-web3torrent/ https://blog.statechannels.org/introducing-web3torrent/
  - garyclarke27 6y ago
    I would rather Wikipedia took some advertising, rather than it’s begging pop ups which have become more intrusive and irritating recently.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      That literally makes no sense. You'd rather a rectangle telling you to consume sugar than a rectangle asking if you can support an organisation that provides a service you use?
      - Sharlin 6y ago
        Ads are easier to block, or just ignore as a fact of life. Donation requests might cause irritating cognitive dissonance.
        softwarejosh 6y ago
        then you should be asking for a paid membership
        Sharlin 6y ago
        The point is, of course, that you don’t really want to pay for it but feel sort of guilty if reminded that keeping it running costs money. Textbook example of cognitive dissonance.
        sujinge9 6y ago
        That sounds like the donation request is being effective...
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- xxs 6y ago
  They are less likely to contribute, explore more, or check the veracity of the info. Google routinely shows disputed info in their short excerpts. Personally I dislike the attempt to scrape and show results of their original sites.
- perfectstorm 6y ago
  > people learn stuff even faster I agree with the faster part but these snippets Google shows often times lacks context and other miscellaneous information along with deep links to many other great articles.
armagon 6y ago
I skimmed the article. People search google; it gives a paragraph from Wikipedia. That answers their question, and they go on their way; this has reduced the number of people that click on the link to see Wikipedia. I fail to see the problem. Wikipedia doesn't show ads, and isn't run for profit. If people get the tidbit of info they needed, they've been served. If they didn't click on Wikipedia to get it, that means Wikipedia saves money. This seems like a good thing to me.
- ysavir 6y ago
  And when fewer and fewer people are exposed to the donation banners/buttons on Wikipedia because they stop at the Google results page, how will Wikipedia keep running? It might be a non-profit, but donation banners _are_ ads, and denying Wikipedia its page views denies them donations in the same way it would deny other sites ad revenue.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Wikimedia Foundation mission is: >The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. The mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible" and donations should exist to support the mission not vice-versa. Google seems to be helping in their mission of disseminating information.
    - thayne 6y ago
      > 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.
    - ysavir 6y ago
      > The mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible" No, it's not, but it should go without saying that accomplishing the mission includes keeping Wikipedia alive and functioning. It would hardly be accomplished if Wikemedia goes under, leaving Google, Bing, DDG, and other search engines to either use out-of-date information, or worse: update that information through questionable practices. I understand that Wikipedia is a non-profit organization. But that doesn't mean that they don't have costs that need to be paid, nor does it mean that they will celebrate shutting down and handing responsibility for their mission over to a for-profit company that has no concern for that mission. Wikipedia has costs and needs to raise money to cover those costs. Caching results on Google search pages may reduce some hosting expenses, but that's only a gain so long as the money saved in server costs is more than the money lost from disappearing donations. And an organization without consistent revenue (such as from selling a product or service) needs much more runway than an organization that can depend on sales to regularly replenish the bank account. Because when the Google and other search engines eliminate the last of Wikipedia's donations, the only factor in Wikipedia's lifespan is how much cash they have in their coffers. And the more donations they collect now, the longer the runway they will have.
jawns 6y ago
Putting aside the criticisms of Google for its near monopoly on search, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that Wikipedia "loses" a visit just because Google happens to be able to deliver the desired information on the search results page itself. In many cases, visitors aren't using Google search because they want a webpage. They're using Google search because they want an answer to a question. Google is answering that question without them having to click through to another site, and visitors are fine with that. Likewise, I wouldn't say that all of the online calculator websites are "losing" visits just because I plug 3^3 into my search bar and get 27. Note that in some cases, Google has license agreements with the websites from which they gather that information, so while the visitor may never land on the source website, that source website still gets remuneration. Besides, if you think it's bad that Google is providing content from other sites so that visitors never have to land on the source site, just wait until you hear about AMP ...
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Right. This is not "Google stealing clicks", it's users saving clicks because they were only interested in looking up that kind of basic information. It optimizes time and effort.
  - LunaSea 6y ago
    And how will that work when Wikipedia stops existing due to a decrease in funds from people seeing the donation banner?
    - rodw 6y ago
      This is the "blogs kill newspapers" argument again. You're not wrong - and arguably they _did_ - but this is a perennial problem for web content. Aggregators are more profitable than content creators, but they kill their suppliers.
- basch 6y ago
  I dont believe it the case that Google is returning the correct info though, and I believe attributing this primarily to zeroclick is wrong. As the latter part of the article says, for a while now, google has filled the top of the page with tangently related videos, places to buy music, and other media, when all I wanted was the wikipedia article. They seem to have demoted wikipedia off the first page of many search phrases. I have to search wiki directly or add wikipedia as a search term to bring it back. Google is not saving clicks, they are making me search twice.
blakesterz 6y ago
"Out of nearly 890,000 monthly searches worldwide, only 30,000 actually become search visits to a website" Wow, I never thought about it, but I be my searches vs. clicks ratio is about the same for many searches. Google must being doing this on purpose, which must be hurting many sites. I'm sure I've read about this before, but I'm not sure I've seen those numbers before.
gtirloni 6y ago
What's with the top header constantly appearing and disappearing in this website?
- rodw 6y ago
  It seems that it disappears (rolls off the top of the screen) when you scroll down, and reappears when you scroll up. There's little or no "inertia" in that behavior though, so depending on your mousewheel/track-pad/touch scroll behavior that can seem kinda flaky. A tiny scroll-up action brings the sticky header back. I have noticed other sites that do that can be really annoying on mobile, but on a MacOS laptop at least this site seems to do it pretty well (IMO). It might benefit from not re-displaying the header until you've scrolled up a little more than it does now (again, IMO). I.e,. maybe have a threshold of a certain number of pixels (>1) or a certain velocity of scrolling-up before the header re-appears.
  - rodw 6y ago
    UPDATE: Playing with it a little more I do think it is a little flakier than that. There's something weird about the marquee image that makes the header re-appear for reasons I don't understand. If you use the arrow keys for scrolling (so there's no chance of an accidental "bounce" when you stop moving your fingers) the behavior is a little more obvious and consistent, but you can see that when scrolling from the top of the page the header disappears then comes back briefly for reasons that aren't clear to me. Clever or subtle UI/UX behaviors on the web are hard.
    - mthoms 6y ago
      Yes, I found the page nearly unbearable and I normally like HackerNoon. This must be a relatively new bug.
colmvp 6y ago
I've definitely noticed that I"ve had to add "wiki" to my search results to see Wikpedia articles to certain subjects I'm searching for whereas in previous years, Wikipedia was almost always the number one result. I feel like I'm back in the 90s when Yahoo went from a pretty good search engine to mediocre with ads and stuff, and I marveled at the clean simplicity of Google. Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of articles from dubious sources and whereas DDG will pull Wikipedia articles closer to the top.
- realusername 6y ago
  I've been noticing it for a while, the search quality gets worse and worse every year. For me, the red line was the Panda update in 2011. That update completely destroyed the search quality by bringing dubious quality news articles and ecommerce websites on the top of search, it never really recovered since then.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    At this point, I basically have to append "reddit" to every search if I want to get quality answers.
    - realusername 6y ago
      That's exactly what I've been doing almost unconsciously, I'm adding "wiki" or "reddit" at the end of every query except for programming ones. 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.
      - JaRail 6y ago
        Even programming questions. If it's something considered popular, you get awful results. Take javascript, I always append "mdn" when I'm trying to look up a language/api detail. Otherwise I'd be sifting through the top ten garbage Q&A or tutorial sites. In the glory days, Page Rank would return reference material first since it was so heavily referenced. But clearly that no longer works in the real world of SEO optimization.
liveoneggs 6y ago
the great irony is that wikipedia-clone sites were a massive part of the original "panda" update
NelsonMinar 6y ago
As a user, this is mostly great; I like getting information faster. (Although Google has an alarming habit of showing information that's wrong or outdated.) As a fan of Wikipedia and other web sites, this is disastrous. Their content is being used by Google and they get little to no benefit for it. It's a similar situation to what the European news agencies were saying about Google News a few years ago. I wasn't so sympathetic to them, but I am more sympathetic to Wikipedia. It's not a huge problem for Wikipedia since their pages are not ad-supported. But this kind of siphoning of user views is devastating for commercial sites.
zpeti 6y ago
It's a shame that a lot of the antitrust criticisms of google don't focus on Youtube. The fact that youtube is one of the main rivals to wikipedia in results is highly suspicious to me, and should be to antitrust regulators. Of course at this point its a bit of a self reinforcing cycle, because youtube ranks, it gets more and more content, becomes more popular, and so google might be ranking it more and more legitimately. But I find it impossible to believe that youtube would have done as well and would be doing as well in SERPS if it wasn't a google property. They've clearly built another site and brand with their own monopoly, similar to internet explorer by microsoft. It would be such an easy target to go after imo.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  The main rivals to YT are sites like Vimeo and Twitch, not Wikipedia. And I don't think either of those is anywhere near YT-scale. It's really hard to run that kind of service in a profitable way, and even harder to let creators monetize their content directly the way YT does.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    How is YouTube not a competitor to Wikipedia? Both are community powered content. They would be directly competing on many major search terms. The fact that the editorial standards and media formats are different is beside the point.
  - monodot 6y ago
    Yes, but in SERPs I think the main rivals to YT are independent blogs and content sites. Search for "how-to" type queries on Google, and it will often return videos from its own property (YouTube) ranked above text-based content. Google would prefer you to stay within its ecosystem. This is anticompetitive.
crazygringo 6y ago
> ...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. > ...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months... "Cost"? "Steal"?! This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is open content, you literally can't steal from it -- being open content was part of its original mission statement! I personally love it when my search results just give me the answer I'm looking for, so I don't have to click through to Wikipedia (or any site) and wade through a page to try to find it, and maybe it's there or maybe it's not. The idea that Wikipedia's success ought to be measured in pageviews is deeply misguided. The more its content spreads and is reused across the world, online and offline, the better it is for humanity. And to be clear, this certainly isn't any kind of "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy on Google's part. Wikipedia isn't declining or going away. Every time you need to read an actual whole article, you still go there. This is solely about convenience in getting quick facts. This is good -- not bad, folks.
- moneywoes 6y ago
  Doesn't less page views also mean less donations?
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    That's possible, but not the argument being made here. This is a hypothetical loss. And it doesn't change the fact that if you have open content then you have open content.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - thesimon 6y ago
    Don't they have more than enough money already?
    - dawnerd 6y ago
      They surely would if they weren’t needlessly adding terrible UX “features”
nwienert 6y ago
Have any HNers used google without ad blocking lately? It’s sort of insane. Even with it, I have just a huge variety of workaround I use to find anything remotely valuable. Usually adding reddit, wiki, HN, SO, examine, and all sort of other specificity filters. If you’re shopping, looking at health issues, comparing things, it’s worthless. If you’re looking for anything scientific it’s worse than worthless, it often links to a full page of pop sci articles that are just... wrong. Google scholar of course works well. If you’re searching for news it’s basically entirely mainstream, entirely based on the last news cycle, and entirely homogenous. And of course the Wikipedia links have gotten harder to click. Keyboard nav still purposely is weird. AMP pages break UX. It’s funny because if I didn’t know so many tips and tricks I’d basically not “know” anything. I’d buy poor products at high prices, I’d believe the latest pop science, I’d only know one or maybe two mainstream opinions on news, etc. That the worlds number one information finding service seems to have rolled over to a variety of bad incentives is a bit horrifying.
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  Google results lately are absolute garbage without an ad blocker, and just regular garbage with one. With no ad blocker, for any query I run, ads fill the whole screen when I search. I have to scroll down to see the first normal result.
- nisa 6y ago
  Google News is also pretty much totally broken for a while. You have to look very hard for a way to sort by date - by default it somehow thinks articles from 2018/2019 are what I'm after and it's often not returning articles that exist, are from normal newspapers and can be found by the same query in Google - there are also no useful facettes left and sometimes there is some sort of amnesia for everything older than 2017. Not sure why they are doing it (maybe it's only broken in Germany due to even more braindead "Leistungsschutzrecht" law but something really feels off.
- azangru 6y ago
  > If you’re shopping > If you’re looking for anything scientific > If you’re searching for news Good thing I am using it to search for code snippets and error messages then :-)
lameiam 6y ago
why is this a bad thing? Often Wikipedia is responsible for publishing the info that google displays as the one zero-click result. I just assumed that Wikipedia objectives include making all information easily available. So, by that measure, Wikipedia is succeeding or so it seems. Wikipedia is not add driven and therefore how much traffic the site attracts really is secondary to meeting their knowledge sharing goals.
pjfin123 6y ago
"In 2015, Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months" As someone who has contributed content to Wikipedia and makes a (small) monthly donation this seems like a good thing. I support Wikipedia so that knowledge can be more easily and freely distributed and Wikipedia content is generally licensed under CC-BY-SA. Google following the license to make information sharing from Wikipedia more seamless (while reducing the load on Wikipedia servers) seems like a win for everyone.
coliveira 6y ago
I hate the fact that Google tries to change itself every couple of years just to make more money. The initial company proposition of giving me search results quickly and getting out of the way was the best ever. Over time, they instead want to keep people for as long as possible so they can present more advertisement links.
lawrenceyan 6y ago
Has Wikipedia itself as a foundation ever commented on what it thinks of this? From an outsider's perspective, it seems like they're largely benefiting from this. Nobody owns the data that is encapsulated within Wikipedia, so there shouldn't be any issue of infringement here either.
nautilus12 6y ago
I think the bigger issue is just that Google becomes even closer to a monopoly on information and the information being presented here is by design surface level. Maybe Wikipedia shouldn't care about surface level answers. They are designed for more detailed information.
gundmc 6y ago
I see a lot of misinformation in the comments here across multiple threads. Here are a couple sourced rebuttals. > Featured snippets means no one clicks through to the source and thus underlying sites lose money. Fact: Features snippets are optional for site creators and can lead to dramatically increased engagement in terms of sessions and CTR. [1][2] > Weather.com in particular is hurt because it is ad supported no one leaves the Google page for weather. Fact: The Weather Company happily partners with Google for this functionality. “The Weather Company, alongside governments, partner with Google to provide the world’s best weather solutions. We are happy to see Google continue to join with us and others in helping citizens stay informed.”[3] [1] - https://searchengineland.com/seo-featured-snippets-leads-big-gains-236212 https://searchengineland.com/seo-featured-snippets-leads-big... [2] - https://blog.alexa.com/featured-snippets-in-search/ https://blog.alexa.com/featured-snippets-in-search/ [3] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/09/01/google-takes-another-leap-into-the-weather-biz-with-hurricane-tracker/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
KorfmannArno 6y ago
Wikipedia is over. Mark my words.
deleted 6y ago
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fumar 6y ago
Can you use noindex to stop Google from crawling your site but allow other search engines?
millette 6y ago
On the other hand, wikipedia's use of nofollow makes it pretty clear they don't want a level playing field. What makes wikipedia great is all the references it builds on, yet those same references never get any "link juice".
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Wikipedia uses nofollow to discourage spam edits. Google and other search engines are free to ignore nofollow and try to assess link quality in other ways.
  - millette 6y ago
    Editors are usually pretty quick at removing spam links. But yeah.
    - pjscott 6y ago
      At the current level of spam link posting, sure. But if getting spam links into Wikipedia were more valuable -- say, if they stopped using rel=nofollow -- I wonder how much the amount of incoming spam would increase.
      - millette 6y ago
        I would be happy to know they tried, or at least considered it. Maybe they have and I'm just not aware of it. It's just something that always bugged me a little.
xnx 6y ago
Alternate headline: "Google Saves Millions of Hours of Time by Providing Answers Directly" Is this a valid analogy?: Imagine you had a brilliant friend who read all the books in a library and answered any question you asked her. Would you say this friend is stealing profit from book publishers?
- casefields 6y ago
  Then, Cloudfare's DDos protection, reCaptcha, and a bunch of other new nuisances, take it back with extra on top.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  If my friend was a billion-dollar company that sells ads, then yes I would. Google is taking the intellectual property of other content producers and monetizing it directly. This impoverishes the rest of the internet and redistributes money from a diverse field of competitors to a single quasi-monopolistic company. Which is bad for the internet as an ecosystem long term. Countries like France and the European Union with the copyright directive last year luckily strengthened the property rights of news organisations and Google had to strip snippets out of their results or strike a revenue-sharing agreement with the companies in question. It is utterly absurd to me that a search engine is supposed to be able to capitalise on the original content of others for free.In fair use doctrine, it is generally considered that a service crosses the line between fair use and piracy if it functions as a substitute. This is exactly what Google is doing.
coronadisaster 6y ago
It probably should be considered copyright infringement at some point...
doe88 6y ago
Conscious of this issue I always take time to search (it's not always straightforward) the wikipedia link and click to go to the wikipedia page to somehow not endorse Google's behavior scraping data they do not own and exposing everything in their cards (obviously what I do is certainly useless, I still use Google Search in the first place, anyway, it just be a kind of placebo effect for my brain to feel good).
KingOfCoders 6y ago
Also Wikipedia results don't show - my feeling - up as often as in the past.
ibudiallo 6y ago
People saying that this is a good thing because they save on server cost. You are right about that part. But the problem is that the search snippet with wiki powered data is a Google Product. When users consume this data, they become Google customers, not Wikipedia users. Even my little website has seen a 30% drop in traffic, but I appear in much more snippets. Those users get their information and never visit my blog at all. This creates loyal google users [1], not loyal < insert blog/business name here> followers [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/no-loyalty https://idiallo.com/blog/no-loyalty
- fillipvt 6y ago
  You can disallow Featured Snippets with `max-snippet`. Read the docs here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812
ir77 6y ago
if you want to specifically have google find you a wiki article why not just go to wiki directly, or bookmark it on your phone and create an app, or use any of the many apps that go to wiki directly. i don't like google but this practice seems 100% legit, someone looking for a broad answer finds an answer immediately outside of wiki and they're happy with it. i personally don't want -- ever -- wiki to be #1 on my search results, if i want a wiki answer i'll go there directly, i use search engines to find variety of answers.
caymanjim 6y ago
I visit Wikipedia dozens of times per day. My most-frequent Google search is "wiki foo". The top link is almost always Wikipedia, and it's almost always exactly what I want. I appreciate the quick facts box at the top, but I still end up on Wikipedia. I also have a Chrome search shortcut so that I can type e.g. "w the west wing" to go directly to the Wikipedia article, but to use that, I need to know the exact spelling and wording of the article title, because Wikipedia's own search engine is horrible. I would venture that Google is the single largest driver of traffic to Wikipedia itself.
darth_avocado 6y ago
Just thinking beyond One Click Traffic, I remember there was a time when searching for a <term> would automatically have wikipedia as the top search result, but now often, it is not even on the first page. And modifying my search as <term wiki> would still get me wikipedia as the second result. It may not seem like a problem, but it is.
deleted 6y ago
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aezell 6y ago
Lots of comments here about the Wikimedia Foundation's finances. You can get all that info here: https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY18-19.pdf&page=6 https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wiki... You can also explore project usage statistics here: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects
aritraghosh007 6y ago
Rings a bell from when the EU decided to slap a fine on GOOG for swaying away consumer traffic in favor of its own shopping platform.[1] But that was for-profit claims and authorities were swift in action whereas this case would be extremely interesting to follow from an online free speech advocacy POV. 1. https://searchengineland.com/response-eu-antitrust-ruling-google-shopping-now-showing-ads-competing-cses-293059 https://searchengineland.com/response-eu-antitrust-ruling-go...
mundo 6y ago
Only tangentially relevant, but a keyworded bookmark in Firefox is very useful way to get to wikipedia. If you create a bookmark like this: name: wp location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s tags: keyword: wp then typing 'wp foo' in the url bar will take you straight to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo.
- Aachen 6y ago
  I do the same but with "wi" because I find it's nicer to type, but yeah this sort of thing lets me skip search pages regularly. I also have a shortcut for word definitions in English and Dutch, skipping the YouTube search results page and go straight to the top hit, Dutch and German Wikipedia... I may like shortcuts a little too much.
fongitosous 6y ago
this is the real monopoly in western civilization. the zero click allows google to dictate a narrative on every topic
mrlonglong 6y ago
"Organic"? Is this some kind of "cool" hipster thing?
pcj-github 6y ago
Although it is handy from a user's perspective to quickly get the answer they want, scraping the information off Wikipedia and packaging it slightly different has always felt like cheating to me. Seems like this behavior will be part of the inevitable anti-trust case against Google.
nerf0 6y ago
Wikipedia was a text gold mine waiting to be mined. They even publish data dumps themselves that anyone can download. I doubt they had any problem with people "stealing" their data. Just recently I made a website that extracts information from Wikipedia and presents it in a different way [0]. I think it's a great thing that this is possible. [0]: https://whataday.info/ https://whataday.info/
8bitsrule 6y ago
In the case of Wikipedia: If a single search result answers someone's question, it probably wasn't all that profound. 30-volume encyclopedias are great for learning in depth, but sometimes you just need to know something fairly trivial... more digits in pi, say. "71% of [Freddy Mercury] searches end there, without a click to a specific site." I'd like to know about a lot of things in more depth, but there's only so much time. If I'm focused on reading something that just mentions a name (it assumes I know) I might just search it to complete that omission. The article fails to differentiate the two search-types, and so leaves that important question hanging.
voodootrucker 6y ago
Banning advertising is the answer. Stew on that for a minute before you downvote. Monetary flow is the basis for our financial system and making the user not the customer undermines the basis of why anyone does anything in a more fundamental way then the movement from the barter system to paper money did. [edit] random source https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-ad...

435 points by caution 6y ago

Shouldn't Wikimedia Foundation be grateful for that? Their goal is met — people learn stuff even faster, and also they incur less server costs, because Google eats them. For a site without ad revenue, it looks like a total win-win for them!

9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
Exactly. Wikipedia's content is CC-licensed precisely to allow reuse of all kinds, including this.
bootloop 6y ago
I believe it's a big problem that people don't know anymore where their "information" comes from (and who paid for it).
onion2k 6y ago
People perceive that they can get the information for free from Google, so they're a lot less likely to donate to Wikipedia even though that's where Google gets the information from. Imagine a future where Wikipedia finally runs out of money after trying bigger and bigger donation banners and has to stop providing the service. As users expect to see the sidebar in Google's search results pages Google would hoover up all the data and bring control of it in-house, and we would only see whichever facts Google chooses for us. I'm not sure that would be a good thing.
- tantalor 6y ago
  Google, as well as many other companies, has long relied on Wikipedia for its content. Now, Google and Google.org are giving back. Google.org President Jacquelline Fuller today announced a $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment. An additional $1.1 million donation went to the Wikimedia Foundation, courtesy of a campaign where Google employees decided where to direct Google’s donation dollars. https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-million-to-wikipedias-parent-org/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...
  - matteuan 6y ago
    Wikipedia spends more than that only for "Donation processing expenses". Of course it is a nice contribution but, in my opinion, very small if compared to the huge value that Google is able to get for free. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/financials-leadership/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...
    - sjwright 6y ago
      I was going to be even more cynical and say that 3 million sounds absolutely pathetic relative to the scale of both entities, and given how important it is to the quality of Google’s search results.
      - xigency 6y ago
        I would be even more cynical and say that $3 million is more than enough to cover all of Wikipedia's expenses and that the rest is bureaucratic fluff. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3112115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3112115
        xigency 6y ago
        To add to my own comment, this [1] was the submission that I originally had in mind. It was in the 2007-2008 operating year that Wikipedia's expenses crossed the $3 million threshold. In 2015-2016 the expenses were >$65 million. In 2019, they were $91 million. Remember that the content creators work for free. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
  - pydry 6y ago
    I remember when Wikipedia used to warn against donations from Google and the like and running ads because even if it didn't undermine their independence it would at the very least undermine the perception of their independence. Looks like they're ok with it now though. I suspect it won't be too long before they get used to this largesse and won't want to do anything that might jeapoardize it.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  AIUI, Google does give proper credit to Wikipedia whenever it's reasonable to do so. Technically they don't even need to do this for a lot of basic machine-readable information that Wikidata is making available via CC0.
- bzb3 6y ago
  And Wikipedia gets its information from their editors. When are the editors getting their fair share of the money? :')
  - LunaSea 6y ago
    Wikipedia is a non-profit and money goes to servers and wages for a few staff members. Google gets advertisement money out of it and is a for-profit organisation ...
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      Actually, the organization behind Wikipedia has way more than "a few" staff members. There's been a perceived problem with excessive spending growth for many years now although to be fair, the increased spending has also allowed for compelling new features, projects, and avenues of editor support. (Stuff like the Visual editor, newer successful projects like Wikivoyage and Wikidata, initiatives to support article-editing in educational and scholarly settings, large-scale contests to support the editing community, etc. etc. just wouln't exist absent that revenue growth.)
- idoby 6y ago
  I imagine a future where a project like wikipedia is replicated endlessly by willing users on an IPFS-like network, where people can donate CPU, storage and bandwidth instead of money to pay for a centralized server, simply by running something like ipfs pin wikipedia (or a subset)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    Sounds kind of like a newsgroup, with every client also being a server. I think torrents can be dynamically updated now.[1][2] Maybe we already have the tools we need, we just haven’t put all the pieces together yet. [1] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html [2] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
    - idoby 6y ago
      That's right. We need to start thinking decentralized. Instead of using DNS to find a server and HTTP to get the content from it, we should switch to a decentralized lookup of the data itself, sourced from wherever the network can serve it. I don't mind getting one wiki page from Peter and another from Paul.
      - aspenmayer 6y ago
        I think IPFS and Filecoin could solve these problems and keep attribution and data integrity intact. Would be nice to have the privacy of monero or another more private coin to facilitate subscription functionality with built in micropayments.
      - aspenmayer 6y ago
        Update on this front: Web3Torrent adds etherium micropayments to WebTorrent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23602008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23602008 https://blog.statechannels.org/introducing-web3torrent/ https://blog.statechannels.org/introducing-web3torrent/
- garyclarke27 6y ago
  I would rather Wikipedia took some advertising, rather than it’s begging pop ups which have become more intrusive and irritating recently.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    That literally makes no sense. You'd rather a rectangle telling you to consume sugar than a rectangle asking if you can support an organisation that provides a service you use?
    - Sharlin 6y ago
      Ads are easier to block, or just ignore as a fact of life. Donation requests might cause irritating cognitive dissonance.
      - softwarejosh 6y ago
        then you should be asking for a paid membership
        Sharlin 6y ago
        The point is, of course, that you don’t really want to pay for it but feel sort of guilty if reminded that keeping it running costs money. Textbook example of cognitive dissonance.
        sujinge9 6y ago
        That sounds like the donation request is being effective...
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
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xxs 6y ago
They are less likely to contribute, explore more, or check the veracity of the info. Google routinely shows disputed info in their short excerpts. Personally I dislike the attempt to scrape and show results of their original sites.
perfectstorm 6y ago
> people learn stuff even faster I agree with the faster part but these snippets Google shows often times lacks context and other miscellaneous information along with deep links to many other great articles.

armagon 6y ago

I skimmed the article. People search google; it gives a paragraph from Wikipedia. That answers their question, and they go on their way; this has reduced the number of people that click on the link to see Wikipedia. I fail to see the problem. Wikipedia doesn't show ads, and isn't run for profit. If people get the tidbit of info they needed, they've been served. If they didn't click on Wikipedia to get it, that means Wikipedia saves money. This seems like a good thing to me.

ysavir 6y ago
And when fewer and fewer people are exposed to the donation banners/buttons on Wikipedia because they stop at the Google results page, how will Wikipedia keep running? It might be a non-profit, but donation banners _are_ ads, and denying Wikipedia its page views denies them donations in the same way it would deny other sites ad revenue.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Wikimedia Foundation mission is: >The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. The mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible" and donations should exist to support the mission not vice-versa. Google seems to be helping in their mission of disseminating information.
  - thayne 6y ago
    > 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.
  - ysavir 6y ago
    > The mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible" No, it's not, but it should go without saying that accomplishing the mission includes keeping Wikipedia alive and functioning. It would hardly be accomplished if Wikemedia goes under, leaving Google, Bing, DDG, and other search engines to either use out-of-date information, or worse: update that information through questionable practices. I understand that Wikipedia is a non-profit organization. But that doesn't mean that they don't have costs that need to be paid, nor does it mean that they will celebrate shutting down and handing responsibility for their mission over to a for-profit company that has no concern for that mission. Wikipedia has costs and needs to raise money to cover those costs. Caching results on Google search pages may reduce some hosting expenses, but that's only a gain so long as the money saved in server costs is more than the money lost from disappearing donations. And an organization without consistent revenue (such as from selling a product or service) needs much more runway than an organization that can depend on sales to regularly replenish the bank account. Because when the Google and other search engines eliminate the last of Wikipedia's donations, the only factor in Wikipedia's lifespan is how much cash they have in their coffers. And the more donations they collect now, the longer the runway they will have.

jawns 6y ago

Putting aside the criticisms of Google for its near monopoly on search, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that Wikipedia "loses" a visit just because Google happens to be able to deliver the desired information on the search results page itself. In many cases, visitors aren't using Google search because they want a webpage. They're using Google search because they want an answer to a question. Google is answering that question without them having to click through to another site, and visitors are fine with that. Likewise, I wouldn't say that all of the online calculator websites are "losing" visits just because I plug 3^3 into my search bar and get 27. Note that in some cases, Google has license agreements with the websites from which they gather that information, so while the visitor may never land on the source website, that source website still gets remuneration. Besides, if you think it's bad that Google is providing content from other sites so that visitors never have to land on the source site, just wait until you hear about AMP ...

zozbot234 6y ago
Right. This is not "Google stealing clicks", it's users saving clicks because they were only interested in looking up that kind of basic information. It optimizes time and effort.
- LunaSea 6y ago
  And how will that work when Wikipedia stops existing due to a decrease in funds from people seeing the donation banner?
  - rodw 6y ago
    This is the "blogs kill newspapers" argument again. You're not wrong - and arguably they _did_ - but this is a perennial problem for web content. Aggregators are more profitable than content creators, but they kill their suppliers.
basch 6y ago
I dont believe it the case that Google is returning the correct info though, and I believe attributing this primarily to zeroclick is wrong. As the latter part of the article says, for a while now, google has filled the top of the page with tangently related videos, places to buy music, and other media, when all I wanted was the wikipedia article. They seem to have demoted wikipedia off the first page of many search phrases. I have to search wiki directly or add wikipedia as a search term to bring it back. Google is not saving clicks, they are making me search twice.

blakesterz 6y ago

"Out of nearly 890,000 monthly searches worldwide, only 30,000 actually become search visits to a website" Wow, I never thought about it, but I be my searches vs. clicks ratio is about the same for many searches. Google must being doing this on purpose, which must be hurting many sites. I'm sure I've read about this before, but I'm not sure I've seen those numbers before.

gtirloni 6y ago

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

rodw 6y ago
It seems that it disappears (rolls off the top of the screen) when you scroll down, and reappears when you scroll up. There's little or no "inertia" in that behavior though, so depending on your mousewheel/track-pad/touch scroll behavior that can seem kinda flaky. A tiny scroll-up action brings the sticky header back. I have noticed other sites that do that can be really annoying on mobile, but on a MacOS laptop at least this site seems to do it pretty well (IMO). It might benefit from not re-displaying the header until you've scrolled up a little more than it does now (again, IMO). I.e,. maybe have a threshold of a certain number of pixels (>1) or a certain velocity of scrolling-up before the header re-appears.
- rodw 6y ago
  UPDATE: Playing with it a little more I do think it is a little flakier than that. There's something weird about the marquee image that makes the header re-appear for reasons I don't understand. If you use the arrow keys for scrolling (so there's no chance of an accidental "bounce" when you stop moving your fingers) the behavior is a little more obvious and consistent, but you can see that when scrolling from the top of the page the header disappears then comes back briefly for reasons that aren't clear to me. Clever or subtle UI/UX behaviors on the web are hard.
  - mthoms 6y ago
    Yes, I found the page nearly unbearable and I normally like HackerNoon. This must be a relatively new bug.

colmvp 6y ago

I've definitely noticed that I"ve had to add "wiki" to my search results to see Wikpedia articles to certain subjects I'm searching for whereas in previous years, Wikipedia was almost always the number one result. I feel like I'm back in the 90s when Yahoo went from a pretty good search engine to mediocre with ads and stuff, and I marveled at the clean simplicity of Google. Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of articles from dubious sources and whereas DDG will pull Wikipedia articles closer to the top.

realusername 6y ago
I've been noticing it for a while, the search quality gets worse and worse every year. For me, the red line was the Panda update in 2011. That update completely destroyed the search quality by bringing dubious quality news articles and ecommerce websites on the top of search, it never really recovered since then.
- MiroF 6y ago
  At this point, I basically have to append "reddit" to every search if I want to get quality answers.
  - realusername 6y ago
    That's exactly what I've been doing almost unconsciously, I'm adding "wiki" or "reddit" at the end of every query except for programming ones. 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.
    - JaRail 6y ago
      Even programming questions. If it's something considered popular, you get awful results. Take javascript, I always append "mdn" when I'm trying to look up a language/api detail. Otherwise I'd be sifting through the top ten garbage Q&A or tutorial sites. In the glory days, Page Rank would return reference material first since it was so heavily referenced. But clearly that no longer works in the real world of SEO optimization.

liveoneggs 6y ago

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

NelsonMinar 6y ago

As a user, this is mostly great; I like getting information faster. (Although Google has an alarming habit of showing information that's wrong or outdated.) As a fan of Wikipedia and other web sites, this is disastrous. Their content is being used by Google and they get little to no benefit for it. It's a similar situation to what the European news agencies were saying about Google News a few years ago. I wasn't so sympathetic to them, but I am more sympathetic to Wikipedia. It's not a huge problem for Wikipedia since their pages are not ad-supported. But this kind of siphoning of user views is devastating for commercial sites.

zpeti 6y ago

It's a shame that a lot of the antitrust criticisms of google don't focus on Youtube. The fact that youtube is one of the main rivals to wikipedia in results is highly suspicious to me, and should be to antitrust regulators. Of course at this point its a bit of a self reinforcing cycle, because youtube ranks, it gets more and more content, becomes more popular, and so google might be ranking it more and more legitimately. But I find it impossible to believe that youtube would have done as well and would be doing as well in SERPS if it wasn't a google property. They've clearly built another site and brand with their own monopoly, similar to internet explorer by microsoft. It would be such an easy target to go after imo.

zozbot234 6y ago
The main rivals to YT are sites like Vimeo and Twitch, not Wikipedia. And I don't think either of those is anywhere near YT-scale. It's really hard to run that kind of service in a profitable way, and even harder to let creators monetize their content directly the way YT does.
- sjwright 6y ago
  How is YouTube not a competitor to Wikipedia? Both are community powered content. They would be directly competing on many major search terms. The fact that the editorial standards and media formats are different is beside the point.
- monodot 6y ago
  Yes, but in SERPs I think the main rivals to YT are independent blogs and content sites. Search for "how-to" type queries on Google, and it will often return videos from its own property (YouTube) ranked above text-based content. Google would prefer you to stay within its ecosystem. This is anticompetitive.

crazygringo 6y ago

> ...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. > ...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months... "Cost"? "Steal"?! This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is open content, you literally can't steal from it -- being open content was part of its original mission statement! I personally love it when my search results just give me the answer I'm looking for, so I don't have to click through to Wikipedia (or any site) and wade through a page to try to find it, and maybe it's there or maybe it's not. The idea that Wikipedia's success ought to be measured in pageviews is deeply misguided. The more its content spreads and is reused across the world, online and offline, the better it is for humanity. And to be clear, this certainly isn't any kind of "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy on Google's part. Wikipedia isn't declining or going away. Every time you need to read an actual whole article, you still go there. This is solely about convenience in getting quick facts. This is good -- not bad, folks.

moneywoes 6y ago
Doesn't less page views also mean less donations?
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  That's possible, but not the argument being made here. This is a hypothetical loss. And it doesn't change the fact that if you have open content then you have open content.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- thesimon 6y ago
  Don't they have more than enough money already?
  - dawnerd 6y ago
    They surely would if they weren’t needlessly adding terrible UX “features”

nwienert 6y ago

Have any HNers used google without ad blocking lately? It’s sort of insane. Even with it, I have just a huge variety of workaround I use to find anything remotely valuable. Usually adding reddit, wiki, HN, SO, examine, and all sort of other specificity filters. If you’re shopping, looking at health issues, comparing things, it’s worthless. If you’re looking for anything scientific it’s worse than worthless, it often links to a full page of pop sci articles that are just... wrong. Google scholar of course works well. If you’re searching for news it’s basically entirely mainstream, entirely based on the last news cycle, and entirely homogenous. And of course the Wikipedia links have gotten harder to click. Keyboard nav still purposely is weird. AMP pages break UX. It’s funny because if I didn’t know so many tips and tricks I’d basically not “know” anything. I’d buy poor products at high prices, I’d believe the latest pop science, I’d only know one or maybe two mainstream opinions on news, etc. That the worlds number one information finding service seems to have rolled over to a variety of bad incentives is a bit horrifying.

ciarannolan 6y ago
Google results lately are absolute garbage without an ad blocker, and just regular garbage with one. With no ad blocker, for any query I run, ads fill the whole screen when I search. I have to scroll down to see the first normal result.
nisa 6y ago
Google News is also pretty much totally broken for a while. You have to look very hard for a way to sort by date - by default it somehow thinks articles from 2018/2019 are what I'm after and it's often not returning articles that exist, are from normal newspapers and can be found by the same query in Google - there are also no useful facettes left and sometimes there is some sort of amnesia for everything older than 2017. Not sure why they are doing it (maybe it's only broken in Germany due to even more braindead "Leistungsschutzrecht" law but something really feels off.
azangru 6y ago
> If you’re shopping > If you’re looking for anything scientific > If you’re searching for news Good thing I am using it to search for code snippets and error messages then :-)

lameiam 6y ago

why is this a bad thing? Often Wikipedia is responsible for publishing the info that google displays as the one zero-click result. I just assumed that Wikipedia objectives include making all information easily available. So, by that measure, Wikipedia is succeeding or so it seems. Wikipedia is not add driven and therefore how much traffic the site attracts really is secondary to meeting their knowledge sharing goals.

pjfin123 6y ago

"In 2015, Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months" As someone who has contributed content to Wikipedia and makes a (small) monthly donation this seems like a good thing. I support Wikipedia so that knowledge can be more easily and freely distributed and Wikipedia content is generally licensed under CC-BY-SA. Google following the license to make information sharing from Wikipedia more seamless (while reducing the load on Wikipedia servers) seems like a win for everyone.

coliveira 6y ago

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

lawrenceyan 6y ago

Has Wikipedia itself as a foundation ever commented on what it thinks of this? From an outsider's perspective, it seems like they're largely benefiting from this. Nobody owns the data that is encapsulated within Wikipedia, so there shouldn't be any issue of infringement here either.

nautilus12 6y ago

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

gundmc 6y ago

I see a lot of misinformation in the comments here across multiple threads. Here are a couple sourced rebuttals. > Featured snippets means no one clicks through to the source and thus underlying sites lose money. Fact: Features snippets are optional for site creators and can lead to dramatically increased engagement in terms of sessions and CTR. [1][2] > Weather.com in particular is hurt because it is ad supported no one leaves the Google page for weather. Fact: The Weather Company happily partners with Google for this functionality. “The Weather Company, alongside governments, partner with Google to provide the world’s best weather solutions. We are happy to see Google continue to join with us and others in helping citizens stay informed.”[3] [1] - https://searchengineland.com/seo-featured-snippets-leads-big-gains-236212 https://searchengineland.com/seo-featured-snippets-leads-big... [2] - https://blog.alexa.com/featured-snippets-in-search/ https://blog.alexa.com/featured-snippets-in-search/ [3] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/09/01/google-takes-another-leap-into-the-weather-biz-with-hurricane-tracker/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

KorfmannArno 6y ago

Wikipedia is over. Mark my words.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fumar 6y ago

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

millette 6y ago

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

zozbot234 6y ago
Wikipedia uses nofollow to discourage spam edits. Google and other search engines are free to ignore nofollow and try to assess link quality in other ways.
- millette 6y ago
  Editors are usually pretty quick at removing spam links. But yeah.
  - pjscott 6y ago
    At the current level of spam link posting, sure. But if getting spam links into Wikipedia were more valuable -- say, if they stopped using rel=nofollow -- I wonder how much the amount of incoming spam would increase.
    - millette 6y ago
      I would be happy to know they tried, or at least considered it. Maybe they have and I'm just not aware of it. It's just something that always bugged me a little.

xnx 6y ago

Alternate headline: "Google Saves Millions of Hours of Time by Providing Answers Directly" Is this a valid analogy?: Imagine you had a brilliant friend who read all the books in a library and answered any question you asked her. Would you say this friend is stealing profit from book publishers?

casefields 6y ago
Then, Cloudfare's DDos protection, reCaptcha, and a bunch of other new nuisances, take it back with extra on top.
Barrin92 6y ago
If my friend was a billion-dollar company that sells ads, then yes I would. Google is taking the intellectual property of other content producers and monetizing it directly. This impoverishes the rest of the internet and redistributes money from a diverse field of competitors to a single quasi-monopolistic company. Which is bad for the internet as an ecosystem long term. Countries like France and the European Union with the copyright directive last year luckily strengthened the property rights of news organisations and Google had to strip snippets out of their results or strike a revenue-sharing agreement with the companies in question. It is utterly absurd to me that a search engine is supposed to be able to capitalise on the original content of others for free.In fair use doctrine, it is generally considered that a service crosses the line between fair use and piracy if it functions as a substitute. This is exactly what Google is doing.

coronadisaster 6y ago

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

doe88 6y ago

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

KingOfCoders 6y ago

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

ibudiallo 6y ago

People saying that this is a good thing because they save on server cost. You are right about that part. But the problem is that the search snippet with wiki powered data is a Google Product. When users consume this data, they become Google customers, not Wikipedia users. Even my little website has seen a 30% drop in traffic, but I appear in much more snippets. Those users get their information and never visit my blog at all. This creates loyal google users [1], not loyal < insert blog/business name here> followers [1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/no-loyalty https://idiallo.com/blog/no-loyalty

fillipvt 6y ago
You can disallow Featured Snippets with `max-snippet`. Read the docs here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812

ir77 6y ago

if you want to specifically have google find you a wiki article why not just go to wiki directly, or bookmark it on your phone and create an app, or use any of the many apps that go to wiki directly. i don't like google but this practice seems 100% legit, someone looking for a broad answer finds an answer immediately outside of wiki and they're happy with it. i personally don't want -- ever -- wiki to be #1 on my search results, if i want a wiki answer i'll go there directly, i use search engines to find variety of answers.

caymanjim 6y ago

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

darth_avocado 6y ago

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

deleted 6y ago

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aezell 6y ago

Lots of comments here about the Wikimedia Foundation's finances. You can get all that info here: https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY18-19.pdf&page=6 https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wiki... You can also explore project usage statistics here: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects

aritraghosh007 6y ago

Rings a bell from when the EU decided to slap a fine on GOOG for swaying away consumer traffic in favor of its own shopping platform.[1] But that was for-profit claims and authorities were swift in action whereas this case would be extremely interesting to follow from an online free speech advocacy POV. 1. https://searchengineland.com/response-eu-antitrust-ruling-google-shopping-now-showing-ads-competing-cses-293059 https://searchengineland.com/response-eu-antitrust-ruling-go...

mundo 6y ago

Only tangentially relevant, but a keyworded bookmark in Firefox is very useful way to get to wikipedia. If you create a bookmark like this: name: wp location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s tags: keyword: wp then typing 'wp foo' in the url bar will take you straight to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo.

Aachen 6y ago
I do the same but with "wi" because I find it's nicer to type, but yeah this sort of thing lets me skip search pages regularly. I also have a shortcut for word definitions in English and Dutch, skipping the YouTube search results page and go straight to the top hit, Dutch and German Wikipedia... I may like shortcuts a little too much.

fongitosous 6y ago

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

mrlonglong 6y ago

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

pcj-github 6y ago

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

nerf0 6y ago

Wikipedia was a text gold mine waiting to be mined. They even publish data dumps themselves that anyone can download. I doubt they had any problem with people "stealing" their data. Just recently I made a website that extracts information from Wikipedia and presents it in a different way [0]. I think it's a great thing that this is possible. [0]: https://whataday.info/ https://whataday.info/

8bitsrule 6y ago

In the case of Wikipedia: If a single search result answers someone's question, it probably wasn't all that profound. 30-volume encyclopedias are great for learning in depth, but sometimes you just need to know something fairly trivial... more digits in pi, say. "71% of [Freddy Mercury] searches end there, without a click to a specific site." I'd like to know about a lot of things in more depth, but there's only so much time. If I'm focused on reading something that just mentions a name (it assumes I know) I might just search it to complete that omission. The article fails to differentiate the two search-types, and so leaves that important question hanging.

voodootrucker 6y ago

Banning advertising is the answer. Stew on that for a minute before you downvote. Monetary flow is the basis for our financial system and making the user not the customer undermines the basis of why anyone does anything in a more fundamental way then the movement from the barter system to paper money did. [edit] random source https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-ad...