Does Wikipedia really deserve having Google as their search frontend?

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Does Wikipedia really deserve having Google as their search frontend?

Post by oranges33 » Mon May 02, 2022 10:09 am

Google is basically just a Wikipedia search frontend at this point. Google anything and Wikipedia is #1 or #2. Is there no one else attempting to make comprehensive articles about subjects with a veil of neutrality?

Encyclopedia.com, Encyclopedia Britannica... I never see these as the first results....

Maybe Google favors Wikipedia because Wikipedia on recent subjects is a Google first-x-pages aggregator? Sites that Google favors, surprise surprise, Wikipedia also favors. Those sites being sites that repost shit from Twitter and Wikipedia and call it "digital journalism". I've seen quite a few talk pages asking users to "just google it"

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Re: Does Wikipedia really deserve having Google as their search frontend?

Post by ericbarbour » Tue May 03, 2022 9:02 am

oranges33 wrote:
Mon May 02, 2022 10:09 am
Google is basically just a Wikipedia search frontend at this point.
It has been since 2005. The WMF and the search engine have been 69ing each other for a long damn time. Do I really need to post the book-wiki article about their deep, loving connections?

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Re: Does Wikipedia really deserve having Google as their search frontend?

Post by ericbarbour » Wed May 04, 2022 3:52 am

Just remember: Google is always claiming to be "the top expert in AI".

And yet.....

https://www.engadget.com/google-fires-a ... 40478.html

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Re: Does Wikipedia really deserve having Google as their search frontend?

Post by ericbarbour » Wed May 04, 2022 3:55 am

Since someone asked.....this will have to be posted in sections:
Google is the Internet's dominant commercial search engine. Started in 1997, at first it ran on Stanford-owned servers. In 1998 a pile of PC motherboards was set up in the garage of Susan Wojcicki in Menlo Park to act as homebrew servers. The firm later moved to commercial space in Palo Alto. Started by Stanford whiz kids Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google Inc. (a division of the holding company Alphabet Inc.) is now the largest Internet company on earth, and the largest advertising firm on earth, with annual revenue in excess of $50 billion per year as of 2013, and $66 billion in 2014.

Practically any article on Wikipedia comes first in a Google search, despite the existence of superior website references. Evidence that Google gives special treatment to Wikipedia abounds. Plus, pro-Google bloggers and fanboys such as Philipp Lenssen have manicured Wikipedia's articles about Google. Even competing search engines, such as Microsoft's Bing, have followed Google's lead and given Wikipedia articles preferential treatment.

Quote from an SEO forum: "Stub pages with zero content often rank #1 above other fantastic content. Mediocre articles on Wikipedia often outrank websites that have a virtual Bible on the same topic".

According to Wales (2010), "60 to 70%" of Wikipedia's traffic comes from Google. [1] Indeed, in October 2001 Wales created a special Wikipedia page called "What Google liked", showing the top referrals from Google. The traffic figures are an absurdly tiny fraction of the top referrals to Wikipedia from Google today. It was active from 2001 until the last revision in December 2003. Attempts to delete it in 2003, and in 2005, failed.
Thanks partly to the Covid mess, their annual income in 2021 had risen to $256 billion.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266 ... l-revenue/

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Re: Does Wikipedia really deserve having Google as their search frontend?

Post by ericbarbour » Wed May 04, 2022 3:57 am

Timeline of Google's involvement with Wikipedia

*2003

7 March: Wales starts a discussion on WikiEN-l about "what Google likes".[2] "As you can see, 'what google likes' is dominated by lists."

*2006

November 2: Google donates $30,000 to the Creative Commons group.[3]
November 13: Google buys YouTube for US$1.65 billion. YouTube later became infamous for copyright abuse[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] and hostile attacks/bullying posted on its badly-moderated commenting system, often called "the world's worst".[14][15][16][17][18][19] So bad, academic studies of them are performed[20].
November 28: Google announces a gift of $2m to the Stanford Centre for Internet and Society, which was founded by Creative Commons cofounder Lawrence Lessig.

*2007

March 13: Viacom sues YouTube for copyright infringement, seeking more than $1bn in damages. They argued that 'YouTube appropriates the value of creative content on a massive scale' by ignoring copyright infringement. (YT argued it was under the safe harbour of the DMCA.)
Five days later, Lessig argued in the New York Times that Viacom was trying to get a court to overturn the DMCA and warned that this would stifle innovation. "The Internet will now face years of uncertainty before this fundamental question about the meaning of a decade-old legislative deal gets resolved'. The essay (acc. to Levine, p. 79) mostly took YT's, and thus Google's, point of view.

*2008

Rumored that Google gave $1.5m to Creative Commons. Could not be confirmed. Google was already supporting CC by giving their website special access to Google databases.[21]
July 23: Google Knol opens for business, using CC licensing.[22] Knol was a massive flop. As Kelly Martin said in 2014[23]: "Knol failed because it didn't recreate Wikipedia's "fight club" environment, and didn't provide authors with any revenue sharing. You could write any article you want, but because it was just your article and someone else could write another article with the same name, with neither given primacy. There was no way to "edit war" with the other author, and no simple way to make your article "more prominent" than the other. That, combined with the lack of revenue sharing (Google kept all the ad revenue) left insufficient incentive for people to host content on Google's platform. Wikipedia's offer of "tell the whole world the truth as you believe it" is an extremely powerful motivator, but that only works when "there can be only one"."

*2009

August 27: Sergey Brin and his wife donate $500k to Creative Commons.[24]
In 2009, Google books almost twice the revenue in the US as the entire music recording business.

*2010

February 17: Google gives the WMF a $2 million "gift"[25].
During 2010, Google spends $5.2m in lobbying[26]. Opensecrets.org shows donations to Google's political action committee -- a "who's who" of Google top management. It also donates money to the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society. [27] "What most readers don’t know is that the Berkman Center and many of its leading professors have financial and personal ties to Google and other tech companies—ties that are not disclosed when these academics speak or publish, and that I discovered after auditing a class with Zittrain. "

*2011

August 24: Google would have to pay $500 million to settle federal government charges that it has knowingly shown illegal ads for fraudulent pharmacies in the United States, the Justice Department announced on Wednesday. The fine was for ignoring laxer rules over several years for doing what SOPA would have allowed a court to impose at an earlier stage. As finally revealed in this 2013 Wired article, an FBI sting against Google's AdWords department successfully proved that Google ad-sales representatives would cheerfully assist advertisers in breaking the law. In this case, the federal government forced convicted online-pharmacy con-artist David Whitaker to repeatedly start phony Mexican drug sellers and pressure Google salespeople into helping him break the laws covering online prescription drug sales. It ended up costing Google a $500 million fine, the largest criminal corporate fine in history at the time, plus it forced a drastic change in how they sold advertising. Note this comment: "After announcing Google’s $500 million forfeiture, the US attorney for Rhode Island, Peter Neronha, told The Wall Street Journal that the culpability went far higher than the sales reps Whitaker had worked with. Indeed, he said, some of the company’s most powerful executives were aware that illegal pharmacies were advertising on its site. “We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on,” Neronha said. (Google has denied this, according to press accounts, and Neronha declined to be interviewed for this story.)"
October 4 to October 6: Italian Wikipedia blackout.
November 18: [28] Media announce that Google's Sergey Brin has donated half a million dollars to Wikipedia.
December 9: Creative Commons board meeting [29]. But who attended? (Note that board member Esther Wojcicki is the mother of Susan, a senior VP at Google, and Anne, who is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The first dedicated set of Google servers were set up in Susan's garage in Menlo Park.)[1]
December 10: Jimbo Wales first raises the topic of an anti-SOPA blackout on Wikipedia.
December 14, 2011 Joint open letter denouncing SOPA by Brin, Wales and others around December 14.
December 14: Press announcement from CC with the stirrings of a blackout.

Total lobbying expenses $9.7m

*2012

January 18: Wikipedia is blacked out for a day after a community vote that allows the contributions of hundreds of IP voters and single-purpose accounts to stand.

"And it's not as though there wasn't any contact between Jimmy and Brin in the months before the blackout; their names, along with others, appear on a joint Open Letter to the US government, opposing SOPA, that appeared in mid-December. So, seen from one perspective, all the value that volunteers had created in the English Wikipedia over a decade was leveraged to support one view on copyrights, which happened to coincide with Google's business interests. And Google happened to donate half a million to Wikipedia just around that time." [30]

November: Brin-Wojcicki give Wikimedia another $500,000. [31]

December: Google and Wikipedia Are The Top ‘Research’ Sites For US Students "The Pew Internet Research survey also indicated, “According to the teachers in this study, perhaps the most fundamental impact of the Internet and digital tools on how students conduct research is how today’s digital environment is changing the very definition of what “research” is and what it means to “do research.” Ultimately, some teachers say, for students today, “research = Googling.” Specifically asked how their students would define the term “research,” most teachers felt that students would define the process as independently gathering information by “looking it up” or “Googling.” And when asked how middle and high school students today “do research,” the first response in every focus group, teachers and students, was “Google.”"

Also in December, Google hires inventor and notorious transhumanist crank Ray Kurzweil as "Director of Engineering".[32]

*2013

January 30: A Bloomberg report states that Google had spent $18.2 million on political lobbying in 2012.
June 6: a major revelation that several large U.S. Internet firms were cheerfully assisting the federal government in gathering massive amount of information about their telephone calls and online activities, without proper court orders or other due process. Second firm to be "signed up" by the NSA: Google. In spite of this, and many other problems, Google continues to be loved by Wall Street.
September 27: "Microsoft Wanted Google to Censor a Wikipedia Page About Microsoft", Gizmodo report.

"And like the last episode, it seems as if the takedown request was sent by LeakID on behalf of Microsoft (LeakID is essentially a glorified arm of Microsoft's censorship machine)."
"Yes some are torrents. Some are also weirdly porn? But there are two that are completely innocent. Microsoft Office 2007's Wikipedia page and a freaking tutorial on Microsoft.com. We're pretty sure Microsoft doesn't want to scrub those things off the Internet."
"Google, again, did Microsoft a solid by recognizing Microsoft's errors and decided not to vaporize the links from Google searches. When Microsoft last made the mistake of trying to take down itself, a Microsoft spokesperson told us it was a "simple clerical error". This time, Microsoft decided to cut ties with LeakID. Microsoft told TorrentFreak:"
"“Microsoft is committed to ensuring that enforcement measures are appropriate and completely accurate. We are investigating the circumstances of this takedown and have instructed the vendor that it is no longer authorized to send notices on our behalf.""

24 October: "Kissing Google goodbye", Sydney Morning Herald:

"According to The Financial Times, which combed through the filings of one of Google's Dutch subsidiaries and uncovered the channelling of massive royalties to a Bermuda entity, it's pays only 5 per cent globally. It pays Australia considerably less. In 2011, despite earning revenue of at least $1 billion in this country, it managed to engineer a total tax payment of $74,176."

13 November: when disgruntled YouTube users decided to go after Google VP Bradley Horowitz on his Wikipedia BLP, Jimbo himself showed up to protect it[33].

*2014

[34]: "The Wikimedia Foundation Report, December 2013 says the Brin Wojcicki Foundation gave them a $1,000,000 grant in 2013. This follows $500,000 grants in 2011 and 2012. There was a big public announcement about the 2011 grant, followed up by dozens of news stories, but there's been hardly a mention anywhere of the 2012 or 2013 grants, except on metawiki." [35][36][37][38]
The infamous European court decision that requires search engines to remove personal information from their results becomes a major target of Google and its supporters. Standing first in line to attack it in the media: Jimmy Wales. And the media, especially in the UK, cheerfully gave him a soapbox. [39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] Google then announced the formation of an "Advisory Council" on privacy matters; among its founding members are Wales, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Luciano Floridi, who created his own Wikipedia biography in 2006.

* 2015

"Google, Mighty Now, but Not Forever", 11 February 2015.

"This gets to the crux of Mr. Thompson’s argument that Google has peaked. The future of online advertising looks increasingly like the business of television. It is likely to be dominated by services like Facebook, Snapchat or Pinterest that keep people engaged for long periods of time. “Google doesn’t create immersive experiences that you get lost in,” Mr. Thompson said. “Google creates transactional services. You go to Google to search, or for maps, or with something else in mind. And those are the types of ads they have. But brand advertising isn’t about that kind of destination. It’s about an experience.”"

"Is Larry Page asleep at the wheel?", 14 Feb 2015.

"The question I keep asking people is whether or not Larry Page cares. Does he think Instagram and WhatsApp are threats to Google? Does he care about the state of online advertising? Or is it too prosaic a concern? Would he rather talk about building a car that drives itself?...Big picture stuff is great, and it's about advancing society, so it's good for other people to copy Google. Small picture stuff like how Google makes money is not something Page wants his rivals copying."

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Re: Does Wikipedia really deserve having Google as their search frontend?

Post by ericbarbour » Wed May 04, 2022 4:04 am

There's plenty more. Some of it has the conspiracy-theory odor. Lots of criticism of Larry Page. Take it or leave it.

I won't post the rest until someone explicitly requests it.

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Re: Does Wikipedia really deserve having Google as their search frontend?

Post by Kumioko » Wed May 04, 2022 9:30 am

No they absolutely don't deserve it nor should it and its well know biases be used to train AI. Which seems to be a norm in industry these days. In fact even the DoD has brought it up a few times until I showed them how biased the data was and explained the political and negative military reasons that was a horrible idea.
#BbbGate

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Re: Does Wikipedia really deserve having Google as their search frontend?

Post by ericbarbour » Fri May 06, 2022 4:36 pm

Kumioko wrote:
Wed May 04, 2022 9:30 am
No they absolutely don't deserve it nor should it and its well know biases be used to train AI. Which seems to be a norm in industry these days. In fact even the DoD has brought it up a few times until I showed them how biased the data was and explained the political and negative military reasons that was a horrible idea.
Did they actually believe you? That would be interesting.

Perhaps they should also know that IBM's giant Watson project was one of the first AI databases to scrape Wikipedia as a "natural language source". IBM has tried to market Watson services to the US government as well as major corporations. And one of the Watson project employees become an administrator on Wikipedia, the notorious "Fluffernutter". (Oh, there was NO BIAS there, oh hell no, she wasn't there to "spy" on or influence anyone, don't be silly! She did it entirely on her own! Of course!!! Don't talk conspiracy nonsense!) She was nominated to adminship in 2011 by Brad "Courcelles" Brown. And married him in 2013.

Did she edit the Watson article on Wikipedia? Of course she did. And never declared her conflict of interest.

And in 2015 she quit IBM's Watson unit......and thence became a Wikimedia employee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kbrown_%28WMF%29

You could tell your DOD contacts about this. Granted, they might not believe you. But it happened.

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Re: Does Wikipedia really deserve having Google as their search frontend?

Post by Kumioko » Sat May 07, 2022 10:57 am

The group I was working with absolutely believed me and already had some active concerns and really just needed someone more familiar with the internal workings of the site to confirm their concerns.

As for Watson it also came up as did some other previous AI projects that had various issues with data integrity.

One of the problems from an AI standpoint with Wikipedia is the stability of some articles. They can change a lot in just a few days if its a current topic like Ukraine.

There were a lot of others too of course.
#BbbGate

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