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Wikipedia is one of the most beloved websites on the Internet for its mix of utility, business model without advertising and veteran, since it has been online since 2001 and has marked an entire generation that did not know what Encarta was.

However, the 'free encyclopedia' is not going through one of its best moments. As a Hackernoon report has revealed, Wikipedia has lost 3.3 billion page views in 2019. In January 2020 alone, it has lost 14% of its traffic compared to the same month in 2019: 2.2 billion compared to 1.9 billion page views.

The main culprit of this download is neither more nor less than Google, or more specifically, the Google search engine, which among its many functions and useful tools, often shows excerpts from Wikipedia when doing a search and usually gives priority to YouTube videos, your own platform; or to search-related product ads, which often bring Google benefits as well.

This has been going on for some time, and already in 2017 the first studies and reports were made of the impact that Google's smart searches were having. The trend, however, has been increasing in recent years.

Searches without 'clicks'

Analysts call these results, which provide a Wikipedia response, but do not occur within Wikipedia, 'zero-click' results. Come on, Wikipedia provides a service for which you do not get a reward thanks to the algorithms and functions of Google in your search engine.

For better and for worse, Google is the Internet door of the majority of people in the world, so any obstacle you put to access a website, even this one is designed to benefit the user with more complete searches and not to harm Websites like Wikipedia end up having a great impact.

For example, when was the last time you entered a web page to find out the weather forecast? If you search for 'the time in Madrid' on Google, the answer is in the search engine itself, which displays a graph with the heat it makes. Hence, pages like weather.com only receive a 15% conversion from Google when someone searches for 'the weather'.

A similar case has been experienced by the song lyrics website Genius published a detailed report of how Google is destroying its business by offering song lyrics in the results that, for more inri, were plagiarized from their own website. The system by which they discovered the latter is quite ingenious.

Internet has changed

Despite the fact that Google is the clear agent that harms Wikipedia when someone searches for something, the truth is that the proliferation of other types of websites and services on the Internet have also helped the decline of digital encylopedia.

So it is normal to prioritize Netflix, which is more popular today than Wikipedia, when doing a search on, for example, Tiger Kings. Netflix has the program and Wikipedia explains what it is about and the background of the characters and what happened to them after the series, but the truth is that the most important thing for many is perhaps the first.

Wikipedia has gone in a few years from being the fourth most consulted website in the world to being the thirteenth, according to Alexa (the analytics company, not Amazon's assistant). It would continue to be the fifth without counting the websites of Chinese origin that in our part of the world do not have as much notoriety, but the decline at the global level is still relevant.

In accordance with the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

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