Wikipedia is the perfect contrast to google search results.

- It contains 100% signal- no noise- and provides helpful related links if you need more information.

- Pages are organized and brutalist.

- Every page has a steward who (thanklessly) keeps the information accurate, up-to-date, and ad-free.

Contrast this to Google:

- 50-100% noise (depending on the query; more information requires more queries and therefore less signal)

- SERP pages are disorganized and absolutely riddled with UX dark patterns (modals, banners, autoplaying video, etc). Many pages with good info are over-styled/over-javascripted/over-languaged, and finding the one or two sentences you're looking for is a chore.

- One-off SEO spam plagues everything; ads and affiliate links are pervasive. Stewardship is a waste of time.

As people turn to Wikipedia for information the same momentum that ruined Google is sure to follow. It's already happened to Wikipedia pages that even tangentially touch anything political. If you go on the talk pages you see a slow motion battle between good faith editors that want an encyclopedia of information with a neutral tone, vs bad faith editors that want to use Wikipedia to represent their idealogical narrative. It's even spilled over into historical pages that don't carry the "correct" judgement on the past.

https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-na...

>- It contains 100% signal- no noise- and provides helpful related links if you need more information.

This is not true anymore. From Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger:

>Wikipedia Is Badly Biased

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

It's completely untrustworthy on anything remotely political. Very, very mainstream narrative compliant/reinforcing.

- Every page has a steward who (thanklessly) keeps the information accurate, up-to-date, and ad-free

And many of them inject their personal biases.

For hard science stuff, math, and celebrities, it's pretty trustworthy but as I said, anything remotely politicized will always have the same slant.

A bunch of people claim "heavy slant", but considering how Wikipedia requires citing sources, I have strong doubts about the severity.

Is the complaint here really that some political narratives don't like being reminded what they have said or promised?

It's probably worth noting that Wikipedia breaks character occasionally and does the banner panhandling, intentionally nosediving UX to put an ad front-and-center.

This is the behavior that should be penalized by search engines- however difficult it is to quantify. Wikipedia is some of the highest quality info on the internet, so they should be able to afford the penalty themselves.

> It's probably worth noting that Wikipedia breaks character occasionally and does the banner panhandling, intentionally nosediving UX to put an ad front-and-center.

They are asking for donations to fund their best-in-kind free project. I know ads aren't popular on HN but if you don't want ads, and you don't want a donation banner, how do you expect sites to be funded?

Wikipedia's expenses go up year after year seemingly needlessly. It is making revenues far and above what it needs to maintain the project, but its expenses seem to go up each year anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER

Wikipedia pages are not "owned" by anyone other than the editors' community as a whole.

>If I want factual information, I just go to Wikipedia and use their search.

Wikiepedia is a very good resource for a lot of things, and a good jumping off point, but you shouldn't assume that you are getting "factual information", especially when it comes to hot button social or geopolitical issues.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-c...

Yes fair enough, but I'm not sure you could get those things from anywhere?

It's much easier to type "searchterm" or "searchterm wiki" in your web browser address bar and then click through to the Wikipedia result than it is to first navigate to every individual site and use their non-standard search bar.

I just have https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=%s&title=Special... bookmarked with the keyboard shortcut `w`

So `w fish` will produce `https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=fish&title=Speci...` which auto-forwards to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish

By my calculations it's one less click. Is that going to save you that much in your lifetime to get you better* results?

*better = more predictable in my case

> Google search is good for discoverability if you're new to the web I guess?

This is almost certainly not true. I don't think kids (who make up the vast majority of 'new to the web') care about using Google for discoverability. They'll use YouTube, Twitch and Instagram to find things they care about. Google is for answering questions, not finding new things.

And honestly, it's not generally that good at answering questions.

Source: my 10-year old.

> I'll go to respected online stores

... such as? The only general-purpose online store available to me is Amazon as far as I know, and I certainly wouldn't call them respected.

In the UK, so YMMV.

General "stuff": Argos Clothes: next, M&S Electronics: https://uk.rs-online.com/