[Foundation-l] Is Google allowing users to block Wikipedia?

[Delphine Ménard]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 10:26 PM, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:

> It seems to be a personalized search feature, not directly related to
> Wikipedia visibility in search results.

Two things:
1) before you actually come to this "feature", you'd have to go to the
Wikipedia page, and then back to Google. It does not appear by
default.
2) I can see how it could be harmful in that someone blocks a page
they don't like on Wikipedia and end up blocking Wikipedia altogether.
It then all depends on how easy it is to "unblock" Wikipedia. (this is
true of Wikipedia, but also any other website, actually, just, as
Bence pointed out, the potential for blocking is multiplied by the
number of times Wikipedia appears as first choice in your search.

One thing that might be worth telling Google would be to have some
kind of warning when one searches from something else entirely, that
would say "results are also present in one of the sites you blocked"
or something like that, so that the hurdle of looking into your
preferences is not barring people from even thinking about unblocking
the websites they've blocked because of one page.

Delphine


-- 
@notafish

NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails will get lost.
Intercultural musings: Ceci n'est pas une endive - http://blog.notanendive.org
Photos with simple eyes: notaphoto - http://photo.notafish.org