Should Wikipedia Be Removed From Google’s Results?
Everton | Jan 24, 2007 | Comments
Wikipedia made the controversal decision recently to add nofollow to all of its outgoing links, so that no sites it links to will get any credit to go towards search engine listings, in an attempt to deter link spam.
I don’t want to get into a debate about whether this is a fair move or not, although I do believe that it’s a bit rich for Wikipedia to bite off the hand that fed it – the thousands of sites that linked to Wikipedia, which allowed Wikipedia to have its envious page ranking and high search engine placement.
What I do want to focus on is some of the comments I read on Shellypowers.com this morning on the way to work in the snow:
For many searches I do the relevant wikipedia page will be returned in the top three query results. This is only going to increase over the next few years (and this new announcement will be one of the factors). Time for google to dump wikipedia results!
This comment kicked off a series of subsequent comments that highlighted the fact that maybe the dominance of Wikipedia, and other large sites in search engine results is maybe a bad thing. Yes, a high Page Rank may be a good indicator of relevancy (although this has been proven not to be true in many instances with Wikipedia). The problem I think is that maybe Google’s algorithm applies too much weighting to ‘trusted sources’, creating a virtuous circle and sometimes never allowing a user to find the real ‘news’ or ‘facts’. For example, consider the scenario left in another comment:
Say you are interested in the Holocaust. Your Google search should return topically relevant results & if Holocaust deniers are making lots of links, that is itself something important to know. In this way, the web is different from a library — unless it is Borges Library of Babel — because libraries have librarians who make judgments about the relevance & suitability of their collections. Search engines should be neutral. The responsibility is with the searcher.
What do you think? Should sites that cover such a diverse range of topics as Wikipedia be removed from results? Other candidates could include sites like IMDB.com and tv.com, who dominate movie and film listings.
Such a move wouldn’t really affect their traffic in my view, as they are destination sites in their own rights. Search engines/portals don’t show links to other search engines/portals, so why should they list Wikipedia?
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Filed Under: Internet News
About the Author: Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University.He also writes for Windows 7 News, Windows 8 News and One Tip A Day.
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