Google Versus Wikipedia – Wikipedia Hit where it Hurts

Few would dispute that Wikipedia has been the world leader in user generated free global knowledge over the last decade, but Google has been strangling traffic to the site for more than a year. According to Wikipedia, their English search results declined 21% over the last year, despite increasing every other year. In other words, either Wikipedia has become a lot less popular, or something else is going on.

As with most things, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

During this same period, Google’s shifted from prominently displaying Wikipedia results, to instead using results provided by their own application, known as Knowledge Graph. While the application claims to be every bit as organic as Wikipedia, the fact is that Google owns it – a fact that many speculate means the results are every bit as biased as Google’s ad placement in search results.

With a laundry list of anti-trust lawsuits, legal actions, and outright abuses of power continuing to mount, Google appears to have burnt yet another friend to their service. This has to do with the fact that, when Google results were being gamed the most, back in 2003, Wikipedia seems to have saved Google, simply by being organized and relatively free of commercial influence. As thanks, Google has generously donated to Wikipedia over the years, which makes their departure from the service all the more puzzling.

Of course, if you view Google as a big evil corporation, which more and more people around the world do, Google’s betrayal of yet another ‘net neutrality’ resource will come as no surprise.

Its an ongoing attack by google to keep readers on its search results – and where possible NOT to drive them to third party sites, instead furnish the data straight to users.

This may be good for users – but its hurting publishers and businesses.

For extra Reading:

• http://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-falling-traffic-meaning/
• http://wikipediocracy.com/2014/01/06/googles-knowledge-graph-killing-wikipedia/