> ...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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you have Firefox I would suggest that you go on Wikipedia.org, right-click the search box, click "Add keyword to this search", and pick a keyword. This makes it faster to find information that you know is on Wikipedia.
Chrome has had custom search engine keywords since day one (yes, I actually went to locate a day-one article on this feature[1]). Not sure why every time this topic comes up someone has to mention it as if it’s some sort of Firefox secret sauce, complete with weird replies like if you are “stuck on Chromium” you can emulate this with a pointless round trip to DuckDuckGo.
This, but also, when you're stuck on Chromium, change the default search to DuckDuckGo or Searx and use !w or !wp to search Wikipedia (and !s !sp if you want Google results for some reason, and !g or !go if you want Google results with a filter bubble).
yah, keywords are such a great but probably underutilized feature of firefox. i set up 'wiki' and a bunch of others when i started using firefox over a decade ago. i still use most today, although i've pointedly replaced google with duckduckgo ('g') long ago as well.
> Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of articles from dubious sources and whereas DDG will pull Wikipedia articles closer to the top.
In my (limited) experience, I dislike using DDG because it gets confused by less important words in the search query. For example, for "who coined the term faux pas" Google simply gives a bunch of links to webpages that define and elucidate the term "faux pas". DDG, however, gives a wide variety of results, many being totally irrelevant. The first article is on parapraxis, the second is the wiki article for microaggression (?).
http://archive.is/jv0qd (notice how DDG bolds the phrase "coined the term" in the first link, thinking that this is the relevant part of the query).
It's stuff like this that will prevent DDG from catching on with the general population who have been spoiled by Google.
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.
Yep, google, is a dumpster fire, DDG is my main search engine on mobile and I have not missed it. However, it's still far from optimal. We need a user-driven search engine! No more of this bullshit centralized searcher and censure, we need to flip the script on who gets to decide what kind of filters we want to see. Fuck Google.
Absolutely; native filtering support to exclude the domains of my choosing would be the killer feature for me that would make me switch to basically any search engine. I'll even sign up for an account there, and all the possible privacy/query logging that entails, to maintain the blacklist state. Browser userscript addons are just too clunky, screw up the number of results per page and don't work on image searches.
Let me block tabloids, hate sites and click farms natively and I'm sold.
> Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.
> Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity.
> Get started with searx by using one of the Searx-instances. If you don’t trust anyone, you can set up your own, see Installation.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
Readit News
> ...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.
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.
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
Stratechery had a good analysis of the situation not long ago. https://stratechery.com/2019/the-google-squeeze/
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
Wikipedia is CC BY-SA licensed.
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.
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?
You had me feeling bad until I came across this.
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.
I almost always want more information, and Google tries to make the Wikipedia link as unintuitive as possible in order to keep the user on Google property.
What's more, showing the info box means that the real article link is removed from the results list.
Edit: to clarify, I do find the blue Wikipedia link decidedly small and I often have to actively look for it instead of it being an intuitive click and clear on first sight, especially on mobile.
WRT to the results, they do indeed seem to appear now, but often not in the first or second position. (I do remember that not being the case previously, but I admittedly might be mistaken)
Huh?
If I search for "who founded the new york times", then immediately below the three-line snippet answer, is a big (not small) blue link to "The New York Times - Wikipedia". In fact, it's literally the easiest, most prominent thing on the page for me to click on. Google is helping to guide me on to visit Wikipedia for more info.
I think you're confusing the short excerpts (with have a clear, obvious Wikipedia link) with Google's Knowledge Graph results, which is a different thing and is based on many different sources.
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.
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.
You let yourself see ads on the web?
What does worry me is that less page views may mean less engagement in the form of checking sources, flagging problems, and making edits.
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.
And it doesn't change the fact that if you have open content then you have open content.
Deleted Comment
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
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...
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.
it would be nice if this was a two-party agreement. Google is forcible changing or dictating any potential business model changes Wikipedia might want to make.
this is bad
It was actually kind of cool
You're either free for all, or not.
There isn't a correct query result. Any addition necessitates removal of something else.
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.
Unfortunately it seems the problem is back, especially with Pinterest, Sfgate, the spruce, etc.
[1] https://searchengineland.com/searching-with-google-chrome-om...
gm Google Maps
t thesaurus.com
u YouTube (for music)
pron for porn (after setting up a Google custom search engine that searches your favorite tube sites -- https://developers.google.com/custom-search)
gi for Google Images
r for Reddit (the site search has gotten better -- I used to use Google "site:reddit.com %s" instead).
My only problem with these is somehow the Wayback Machine doesn't work when I put https://web.archive.org/form-submit.jsp?url=%s.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang
In my (limited) experience, I dislike using DDG because it gets confused by less important words in the search query. For example, for "who coined the term faux pas" Google simply gives a bunch of links to webpages that define and elucidate the term "faux pas". DDG, however, gives a wide variety of results, many being totally irrelevant. The first article is on parapraxis, the second is the wiki article for microaggression (?).
http://archive.is/jv0qd (notice how DDG bolds the phrase "coined the term" in the first link, thinking that this is the relevant part of the query).
It's stuff like this that will prevent DDG from catching on with the general population who have been spoiled by Google.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights
Even with it, I have just a huge variety of workaround I use to find anything remotely valuable. Usually adding reddit, wiki, HN, SO, examine, and all sort of other specificity filters.
If you’re shopping, looking at health issues, comparing things, it’s worthless.
If you’re looking for anything scientific it’s worse than worthless, it often links to a full page of pop sci articles that are just... wrong. Google scholar of course works well.
If you’re searching for news it’s basically entirely mainstream, entirely based on the last news cycle, and entirely homogenous.
And of course the Wikipedia links have gotten harder to click. Keyboard nav still purposely is weird. AMP pages break UX.
It’s funny because if I didn’t know so many tips and tricks I’d basically not “know” anything. I’d buy poor products at high prices, I’d believe the latest pop science, I’d only know one or maybe two mainstream opinions on news, etc.
That the worlds number one information finding service seems to have rolled over to a variety of bad incentives is a bit horrifying.
With no ad blocker, for any query I run, ads fill the whole screen when I search. I have to scroll down to see the first normal result.
Let me block tabloids, hate sites and click farms natively and I'm sold.
> Searx is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. > Additionally, searx can be used over Tor for online anonymity.
> Get started with searx by using one of the Searx-instances. If you don’t trust anyone, you can set up your own, see Installation.
There was something magical about diving into a hierarchy of arbitrary classification and finding links to new sites you never knew existed.
Nowadays I never discover new gems on Google. Only Pinterest/Quora/fake-Instagram junk.
But yeah, Google has become grocery store checkout-line tabloids.
> 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 :-)
For a site without ad revenue, it looks like a total win-win for them!
Imagine a future where Wikipedia finally runs out of money after trying bigger and bigger donation banners and has to stop providing the service. As users expect to see the sidebar in Google's search results pages Google would hoover up all the data and bring control of it in-house, and we would only see whichever facts Google chooses for us. I'm not sure that would be a good thing.
Google.org President Jacquelline Fuller today announced a $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment. An additional $1.1 million donation went to the Wikimedia Foundation, courtesy of a campaign where Google employees decided where to direct Google’s donation dollars.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...
Personally I dislike the attempt to scrape and show results of their original sites.
I agree with the faster part but these snippets Google shows often times lacks context and other miscellaneous information along with deep links to many other great articles.
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> Featured snippets means no one clicks through to the source and thus underlying sites lose money.
Fact: Features snippets are optional for site creators and can lead to dramatically increased engagement in terms of sessions and CTR. [1][2]
> Weather.com in particular is hurt because it is ad supported no one leaves the Google page for weather.
Fact: The Weather Company happily partners with Google for this functionality. “The Weather Company, alongside governments, partner with Google to provide the world’s best weather solutions. We are happy to see Google continue to join with us and others in helping citizens stay informed.”[3]
[1] - https://searchengineland.com/seo-featured-snippets-leads-big...
[2] - https://blog.alexa.com/featured-snippets-in-search/
[3] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
Of course at this point its a bit of a self reinforcing cycle, because youtube ranks, it gets more and more content, becomes more popular, and so google might be ranking it more and more legitimately.
But I find it impossible to believe that youtube would have done as well and would be doing as well in SERPS if it wasn't a google property. They've clearly built another site and brand with their own monopoly, similar to internet explorer by microsoft.
It would be such an easy target to go after imo.
When users consume this data, they become Google customers, not Wikipedia users. Even my little website has seen a 30% drop in traffic, but I appear in much more snippets. Those users get their information and never visit my blog at all. This creates loyal google users [1], not loyal < insert blog/business name here> followers
[1]: https://idiallo.com/blog/no-loyalty
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.