Encyclopedia Britannica’s rant on Wikipedia
From the SMH article:
“If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia,” he said.”Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?”
I can’t think of an occasion where Google has returned a Wikipedia entry for a query and that Wikipedia entry hasn’t been totally relevant and detailed.
Besides, the contest for detail, freshness, accessibility and usability Wikipedia wins hands down; compare the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia articles on Alcohol. EB weighs in at roughly 500 words, WP at roughly 3500. Another interesting comparison: the EB article about Wikipedia weighs in at roughly 900 words, the WP article about Encyclopaedia Britannica, 7600 words.
How many people aware of the “state of the art” can readily contribute to EB? Not many. Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia. Not that Wikipedia doesn’t have it’s faults, of course. On the other hand EB isn’t always correct either.
Oh yeah – and to get proper access to Encyclopaedia Britannica, you have to pay fifty quid a year. No thanks.
Google ranks are all about incoming links of course, and this might not necessarily be a good indication of the best quality sources of information. Part of their problem is just that it’s just not cool for nu-media blogging types to link to a dusty old encyclopaedia company website. So I can sympathise with them.
…or at least I would sympathise with them if their website wasn’t pants. How much screen space is given over to the stuff you actually want to read? What’s going on with the images? some kind of javascript lazy-loading trickery? That’s annoying. Wont be linking to them.
Google ranking is also designed to encourage simple clean HTML with meaningful (semantically sensible) interlinking. Wikipedia links to the ‘Organic Compound’ article in the first sentence. Encyclopaedia Brittanica also has an ‘Organic Compound’ link. The link’s got stupid mouseover javascript, which no doubt looks hideous within the HTML. And where does the link point to? Some crappy pharmacy site.
Do they really expect to outrank a site like wikipedia with that?