On 17 April 2017 at 22:27, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Over the past few years, my anecdotal impression is that search results from Wikipedia have become less and less prominent when I use major web search engines.

I'm pretty sure there's some research out there that shows this is true, but off the top of my head I don't know where it is.

I'm aware that Discovery is working on internal search features including cross-project search, and that WMF people working on readership are trying to increase the dwell time and number of pages that Wikipedia visitors spend on Wikipedia. Has anyone analyzed trends for web search engine rankings of Wikipedia articles, particularly over the last few years? Also, is anyone analyzing what would be required to increase the rankings of Wikipedia articles (and information from sister sites, such as Wikisource and Commons) when people use web search engines?

What you're describing is called search engine optimisation.

Oliver looked a Google Webmaster Tools a while back. There's definitely a wealth of information in there, but it was very difficult to make much sense of it. Some of their metrics were the same as ours but they often disagreed by orders of magnitude. We gave up trying to make sense of it.

Discovery doesn't really have anyone with particular expertise in search engine optimisation. I think if we were to do any meaningful work on search engine optimisation, we'd need to hire a person who has experience that can work on it full time. Given this year's mostly flat budget, that sadly seems unlikely.

Thanks,

Dan

Dan Garry

Lead Product Manager, Discovery

Wikimedia Foundation