Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

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 ...

I think this is extremely shortsighted. If this were the whole story, then why would Google be going through the effort of integrating Wikipedia data into zero-click results? Out of charity?

No. Because big picture, those people who go to Google and leave without clicking anything had reinforced that Google finds everything they need easily. It makes them more likely to come back.

So Wikipedia does lose clicks to Google in the sense that it loses to Google an opportunity to impress its brand.

Side note. If you have Firefox I would suggest that you go on Wikipedia.org, right-click the search box, click "Add keyword to this search", and pick a keyword. This makes it faster to find information that you know is on Wikipedia.

If you're using DuckDuckGo, we can use the !w bang to search directly on Wikipedia. Bangs are really handy, when you know where you'll find the answers, and can fallback to !s (startpage) if you feel google will have better answers for current query. This feature has been very useful for me, especially !mdn, !cpp etc. when coding.

I think the correct place to have this is on the browser, not on the search engine. I also have a cpp keyword on Firefox :-) They're getting the same result, except mine is faster and more private.

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.

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.

And how will that work when Wikipedia stops existing due to a decrease in funds from people seeing the donation banner?

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.

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