Lisa Barone has some problems with Wikipedia and she is not afraid to explain them.
Complaint #1: It puts non-expert information at the top of the search engine’s results page.
This is a perfectly legitimate concern. Wikipedia is often edited by people who are not experts on the topics that they are addressing.
The search engines are supposed to reward authoritative, expert content. Wikipedia is not a subject matter expert.
Complaint #2: Wikipedia pushes expert information farther down the SERP.
As a direct result of complaint #1, those people that are experts in their fields don’t get the search engine rankings that they deserve.
We’ve heard time and time again that the search engines reward expert content… If that’s true, why does Wikipedia rank so well? Wikipedia does not fit into this description. There’s a difference between a lot of information and quality information.
Complaint #3: There’s a reason Wikipedia ranks so well in Google. Something fishy is going on!
I don’t for the life of me know what it is, but there’s got to be something there. I want to know what makes Wikipedia rank so well and why 40-50 percent of newly created Wikipedia pages appear in Google’s index with 100 hours of being created. Does Google index your site that fast? I doubt it.
Is Google indulging in some old fashioned favoritism towards Wikipedia? According to ComScore, Google traffic to Wikipedia has risen 166% year over year.
Lisa has more to say.
Originally posted on February 19, 2007 @ 3:11 pm
Oh yeah, like the experts’ clear explanations would be ranking #1 were it not for Wikipedia.
Wake up.
For a start, most experts couldn’t explain their way out of a paper bag. Secondly Google can’t tell the difference between a clear explanation and a hopelessly convoluted piece of ‘expert-certified’ obfuscation.
Those complaints are non-issues, actually. For one search term, there is usually only one wikipedia entry in the SERPS – so the expert content is still there.
Also, I don’t fully agree with the “The search engines are supposed to reward authoritative, expert content.” statement.
Lisa seems to have some strange misapprehensions as to how things work. Or maybe mine are even moreso.
The search engines are supposed to reward authoritative, expert content.
No, she wants them to. And they arguably should. But that’s a different thing from what they’re supposed(as in were designed) to do. The reality is they’re doing precisely what they’re supposed to do, which is rewarding sites that are heavily linked. The fact WP is so heavily linked does give it an overall boost, which is why it’s high even for topics that may not be as fleshed out as they could be.
Google has no idea whether the information there is good. It just knows that lots of people point at it, and infers that it’s therefore good/definitive. This is why Tom’s Hardware and MySpace Tom are seemingly more “important” than Toms Cruise or even Sawyer. (This is also why searching for “tom” is just stupid and meaningless when you’re actually looking for “Tom Sawyer,” but different discussion.)
This is a loophole in the entire concept of links, and part of the reason the vote-links microformat was created. Arguably it’s not a loophole, either, as links are simply neutral connections. It’s the engines making the assumption that all links are positive votes, not that they really have the intelligence yet to be able to tell otherwise on their own.
#2 is linked to the same misunderstanding. Wikipedia pushes down other references which are less heavily linked to; that is all. This is not really about who’s more of an expert.
Also, the expert information is only being “hidden” from people too lazy to use more than one resource, and frankly, they get what they deserve.
Oddly enough, she explains the problems with complaint #3 herself(frequent updates, etc.), but doesn’t seem to realize(or admit?) that the real problem isn’t with the result but that she just doesn’t like the result, which is the underlying issue with the whole rant.
Which leads to this in an update:
I thought it was Google’s job to track down the primary source of information as a way to provide searchers with the most expert information?
…which is just plain wrong. At best, this is what human-edited index sites are for. (Does Yahoo even do this anymore? I haven’t used them in ages.)
Google is nothing more than a fairly smart machine, and doesn’t hunt anything down with nearly that much intent; it just keeps track of all of it and the connections between the pieces.