As of last week [1], Google Knowledge Graph started displaying information on drugs pulled from PubMed. Links to Wikipedia articles on drugs (which still appear in organic search results) have entirely disappeared from the infobox. I expect this to have a significant impact on our inbound traffic from search engines on these topics.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/30/google-adds-key-facts-about-medicines-to-it...
On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Dario Taraborelli < dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I expect this to have a significant impact on our inbound traffic from search engines on these topics.
Do we actually _know_ that Google users have switched behavior, from focusing on the links in the usual results list, to clicking on the smaller "further information" links in the Knowledge Graph container?
My suspicion would be that the majority of users are either:
* Reading the summary from Knowledge Graph, and then moving on to other topics, but not really clicking on results links of any kind. These users are satisfied with the summary. * Still clicking on those top few links in the normal results. These users want more detail, and they are used to sources like Wikipedia that are high up in the normal results.
A good example is searching for Ibuprofen. I get Wikipedia as the first item in the traditional results, and the "more" links in Knowledge Graph are to the NIH. I'd be interested to see some user tests of SERP results like these, to get a feel for what the decision-making process is like.
I wrote a pretty detailed analysis of what changes Google introduced since the launch and how they progressively reduced the visibility of links to Wikipedia, and key metrics we would need to track. I can send it to you off thread if you are interested. To date we have no data on how these changes affect inbound traffic and also virtually no data on unique visits from search engines, (other than rather patchy ComScore reports).
On Dec 2, 2012, at 10:35 AM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Dario Taraborelli dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org wrote: I expect this to have a significant impact on our inbound traffic from search engines on these topics.
Do we actually _know_ that Google users have switched behavior, from focusing on the links in the usual results list, to clicking on the smaller "further information" links in the Knowledge Graph container?
My suspicion would be that the majority of users are either:
- Reading the summary from Knowledge Graph, and then moving on to other topics, but not really clicking on results links of any kind. These users are satisfied with the summary.
- Still clicking on those top few links in the normal results. These users want more detail, and they are used to sources like Wikipedia that are high up in the normal results.
A good example is searching for Ibuprofen. I get Wikipedia as the first item in the traditional results, and the "more" links in Knowledge Graph are to the NIH. I'd be interested to see some user tests of SERP results like these, to get a feel for what the decision-making process is like.
-- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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