Wikipedia talk:Top 10 Google hits

All the ones I've added have turned up in the top 10 without using quotations to return an exact match. (I'm guessing that's the way most people search.) --KQ 11:21 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

This page has some misleading hits, because we titled our articles strangely. "ECMAScript programming language" is indeed hit #1 on a search for "ECMAScript Programming Language" (without the quotes). But who would search for that? A more likely search "ECMAScript" has the Wikipedia article at #22. DanKeshet

At the moment, Google doesn't seem to be returning any wikipedia articles as hits (though it still comes up with the front page if you search for "wikipedia"). Should we be worried about this? --Camembert 16:22 Jan 5, 2003 (UTC)

Yes! We should be very worried, Google is one of our main sources of new contributors. Does anyone know anything about this? Enchanter

Looking more closely, it seems to have the urls indexed, but for some reason hasn't cached any of the texts or page titles from the /wiki directory (see results from [1], for example). Why this has happened, I don't know. Could it have crawled us when we were down, or something? I'm guessing, not something I know anything about, this. --Camembert

What is the policy on removing entries here if they are not in the top ten? I would suggest flagging them if they are in the top 20, and removing them if they are not. WDYT? --snoyes 02:42 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

Well, the current Google situation is a bit problematic. We dropped off the index due to a robots.txt mishap for a while, now we have reappeared, but not all pages seem to be indexed. I'd suggest waiting until mid-March or so, which is when a second Google index round should be complete. Then we should go about deleting the pages which no longer show up. --Eloquence

Yeah we still haven't recovered from dropping-off Google and I don't expect we will be back where we were before the drop-off until late spring. It's a real bummer that we got all the media attention at a time when our articles lost their previously very high Google ratings. --mav

This article is now Large (32k+). I recommend that we reorganise it. It also seems to me that it would be a good idea to include the date on which the article was in the "top ten" since the top ten is pretty dynamic over time. The two ideas could be combined if we split the page into monthly or quarterly sub-pages, something like this:

Of course the current page doesn't have dates, so it's a bit difficult to do this retrospectively but it could be done by anybody (or anybot) willing to consult the page history. Doing this would also make it easy to drop old entries which were of lesser interest if need be. -- Derek Ross

This is probably a good idea, though I should probably point out that we still haven't been fully reindexed by Google (glockenspiel, for example). --Camembert

The date idea would not be very maintainable. Breaking the list up alphabetically is the better choice. --mav

Interestingly, red links seem to get spidered by Google, such as Braga [2] I thought our robots.txt file sorted this out? Martin

Yep - that is a bug. It might be a leftover from when we had the Google problems. --mav

The title of this page is not NPOV. I, like others , dont really agree, that we should "bundle" WP so tight with a private Company [3]. --Nerd 15:11 Mar 20, 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not being bundled. Google handles around 80% of all English language searches made and the Wikipedia list is not either greatly boosting the reputation of the company or acting a s much of an advert. Wikipedia's high pagerank is pleasing and the article reflects the value people put on Google searches to return accurate results. There is a certain pleasure-perturbation in seeing Wiki material top a Google search. 62.253.64.7

but there are some opinions stated like http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html, saying that pageranking is rather creating popularity than expressing it. :) Nevertheless i do think that this title is not neutral: why "Google" and not "alltheweb" oe somethings else. Or should we just mention searchengines, which are bringing aus traffic? is this really neutral? --Nerd