> <i>...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits.</i><p>> <i>...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months...</i><p>"Cost"? "Steal"?!<p>This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google <i>saves</i> Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is <i>open content</i>, you literally <i>can't steal</i> from it -- being open content was part of its original mission statement!<p>I personally <i>love</i> 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.<p>The idea that Wikipedia's success ought to be measured in pageviews is <i>deeply</i> misguided. The more its content spreads and is reused across the world, online and offline, the better it is for humanity.<p>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 <i>solely</i> about convenience in getting quick facts.<p>This is <i>good</i> -- not bad, folks.
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.<p>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.
Have any HNers used google without ad blocking lately? It’s sort of insane.<p>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.<p>If you’re shopping, looking at health issues, comparing things, it’s worthless.<p>If you’re looking for anything scientific it’s worse than worthless, it often links to a <i>full page</i> of pop sci articles that are just... wrong. Google scholar of course works well.<p>If you’re searching for news it’s basically entirely mainstream, entirely based on the last news cycle, and entirely <i>homogenous</i>.<p>And of course the Wikipedia links have gotten harder to click. Keyboard nav still purposely is weird. AMP pages break UX.<p>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.<p>That the worlds number one information finding service seems to have rolled over to a variety of bad incentives is a bit horrifying.
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.<p>For a site without ad revenue, it looks like a total win-win for them!
I see a lot of misinformation in the comments here across multiple threads. Here are a couple sourced rebuttals.<p>> Featured snippets means no one clicks through to the source and thus underlying sites lose money.<p>Fact: Features snippets are optional for site creators and can lead to dramatically increased engagement in terms of sessions and CTR. [1][2]<p>> Weather.com in particular is hurt because it is ad supported no one leaves the Google page for weather.<p>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]<p>[1] - <a href="https://searchengineland.com/seo-featured-snippets-leads-big-gains-236212" rel="nofollow">https://searchengineland.com/seo-featured-snippets-leads-big...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://blog.alexa.com/featured-snippets-in-search/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.alexa.com/featured-snippets-in-search/</a><p>[3] - <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/09/01/google-takes-another-leap-into-the-weather-biz-with-hurricane-tracker/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It would be such an easy target to go after imo.
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.<p>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<p>[1]: <a href="https://idiallo.com/blog/no-loyalty" rel="nofollow">https://idiallo.com/blog/no-loyalty</a>
"Out of nearly 890,000 monthly searches worldwide, only 30,000 actually become search visits to a website"<p>Wow, I never thought about it, but I be my searches vs. clicks ratio is about the same for many searches. Google must being doing this on purpose, which must be hurting many sites. I'm sure I've read about this before, but I'm not sure I've seen those numbers before.
I 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.<p>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.
Only tangentially relevant, but a keyworded bookmark in Firefox is very useful way to get to wikipedia. If you create a bookmark like this:<p>name: wp<p>location: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s</a><p>tags:<p>keyword: wp<p>then typing 'wp foo' in the url bar will take you straight to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo</a>.
Alternate headline:
"Google Saves Millions of Hours of Time by Providing Answers Directly"<p>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?
"In 2015, Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months"<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 ...
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 <i>horrible</i>. I would venture that Google is the single largest driver of traffic to Wikipedia itself.
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.)<p>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.<p>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.
Lots of comments here about the Wikimedia Foundation's finances. You can get all that info here: <a href="https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Audit_Report_-_FY18-19.pdf&page=6" rel="nofollow">https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wiki...</a><p>You can also explore project usage statistics here: <a href="https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects" rel="nofollow">https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects</a>
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).
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.
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.
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".
In the case of Wikipedia: If a single search result answers someone's question, it probably wasn't all that profound.<p>30-volume encyclopedias are great for learning in depth, but sometimes you just need to know something fairly trivial... more digits in pi, say.<p>"71% of [Freddy Mercury] searches end there, without a click to a specific site."<p>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.<p>The article fails to differentiate the two search-types, and so leaves that important question hanging.
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.<p>1. <a href="https://searchengineland.com/response-eu-antitrust-ruling-google-shopping-now-showing-ads-competing-cses-293059" rel="nofollow">https://searchengineland.com/response-eu-antitrust-ruling-go...</a>
Banning advertising is the answer. Stew on that for a minute before you downvote.<p>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.<p>[edit] random source <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-advertising/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-ad...</a>
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.<p>Just recently I made a website that extracts information from Wikipedia and presents it in a different way [0].<p>I think it's a great thing that this is possible.<p>[0]: <a href="https://whataday.info/" rel="nofollow">https://whataday.info/</a>
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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
why is this a bad thing? Often Wikipedia is responsible for publishing the info that google displays as the one zero-click result.<p>I just assumed that Wikipedia objectives include making all information easily available. So, by that measure, Wikipedia is succeeding or so it seems.<p>Wikipedia is not add driven and therefore how much traffic the site attracts really is secondary to meeting their knowledge sharing goals.