[Foundation-l] Question to post...

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 2:56 PM, Cox, Serita<Serita.Cox at bridgespan.org> wrote:
> Google's new search engine, Caffeine, is supposedly kicking Wikipedia
> entries further down results page. Thoughts? Comments?
> http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39484015,00.htm

[from my comments in #wikimedia-tech the other day]
"So— I tried 20 random words, and the WP result was lower in four of
them, the same in the rest."
"No pattern really...  We still have the problem with "article at funny name;
redirect from common name; common name search on google gives squat",
which I consider to be much more major."

When you're at the top there is no place to go but down. A larger
comparison would be nice, but I didn't seen any reason to think that
it was a major change.  I generally expect the SEO people to
over-react to, well, just about everything.


(I went on, on IRC, to point some examples of the behavioural change
that happened towards the end of 2007 (per my cruddy memory) where
non-widely-linked redirects basically fell out of the google index...
search terms like "Jesus bug" or many other things like
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Redirects_to_scientific_names
 ... if we cared about the traffic flux from google we'd see what we
could do to fix that)