Google vs wikis

Google has been returning a lot of useless results in recent months. It's particularly bad if looking up hotels or hostels in a certain location - the commercial sites that promise hotels in every location appear to have Google fooled into showing their sites, rather than actual useful sites. They clog the top results to the extent that it's hard to find a genuine page.

Other sites have pages for all kinds of terms, but without any useful content - yet they appear high up in Google search results. One example is a search for a latin phrase (used by a friend in an email: Googling for "De gustibus non est disputandum" yields a lot of pages which promise definitions but in fact offer nothing. But, scrolling down, I come to Wikipedia's entry. Clicking on it, I learn:


There is much to be said for human-managed collaborative resources, like Wikipedia and Appropedia. Google's a great tool, but it's hard to compete with that many human eyeballs and brains checking and improving a structured collection of articles.

And on that note - I'm doing a study on the many attempts to make a green wiki or development wiki - I can't help but notice that some of the sites with the least content and activity make it onto the first page of results for "green wiki", halfway down or so, but Appropedia doesn't appear till page 3. Okay, I'm guilty of a little competitive spirit, but in some cases there is a clear, objective difference in quality, and Google's not picking it up.

But we'll get there. We're getting increasing traffic from search engines these days, and it's generally from much more specific searches than these. It will increase further as our content expands - and we certainly have plans for that.