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Should Wikipedia Be Removed From Google’s Results?

January 24th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

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 â€” unless it is Borges Library of Babel â€” 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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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, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

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There Are 17 Responses So Far. »

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#17

Comment by Peter Cruickshank on 20 September 2007:

Yes, it’s a pity about the stubs outranking you. But the thing is, search engines need to provide relevant results above all, and usually the wikipedia article is the most relevant result. If I want to do a search on a general topic, the wikpedia article will usually be more what I’m looking for than some blog posting.
#16

Pingback by Backlash Against Large Sites Using NoFollow Begining? | Connected Internet on 26 June 2007:

[...] Even though it’s rare that I add new plugins these days, I still subscribe to the feed from WordPress Plugins DB. One plugin caught my eye yesterday, which appears to have been designed to counter big sites like Wikipedia not giving link love. [...]
#15

Pingback by Google Accounts For 24% Of All Wikipedia Traffic | Connected Internet on 14 June 2007:

[...] also still upset about Wikipedia’s decision to not give credit to sites it links to, even though it has got to where it is today thanks to the millions of sites [...]
#14

Comment by Everton on 29 May 2007:

Amen Sara
#13

Comment by Sara on 29 May 2007:

Wikipedia should not have reinstated nofollow and I’m tired of them showing up at the top of the results. If I want to know what Wikipedia has to say, I’ll go to Wikipedia. When I search with Google I want smaller sites. I agree that Wikipedia and IMDB and the like are destination sites of their own. They don’t need Google for traffic. If they do, they can pay for it with Adwords.

Sara
http://www.pajamaprofessional.com
#12

Comment by Humayun on 16 April 2007:

Well, I don’t want to dig into debate about “Should wikipedia be removed from Google results or not”. But what I usually use Google’s “Exclude particular site” feature from your search results when I don’t want a particular site’s results to be included in my search.
I going to share this to those of you guys here who usually don’t like to see particular site’s results in their search.
Here, For e.g. If you wanna know about “Holocaust” and you don’t want to see wikipedia results in your search then try using this for your…
Holocaust -site:wikipedia.org
This will definitely kick off all results from wikipedia.

Thanks,
Humayun
#11

Comment by Ant on 2 March 2007:

What I feel like saying is that for some months, Wikipedia has become a real annonyance for Google users.
Wikipedia results are generally at the top whatever you search and this dramatically decrease the usual relevancy of Google results that point to the very website you are looking for.
There should at least be an option to hide/remove/block/ban Wikipedia results from Google results.
For the moment, you can reach this goal by adding -wikipedia to your search keywords but a Firefox extension, for example, would even be better.

Thanks in advance to the programmers that would make it.

Ant