Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts

> By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read right in the story.

I presume that this falls under the same consideration as direct links to science papers in articles that are covering those releases. Far as I can tell, the central tactic for lowering bounce rate and increasing 'engagement' is to link out sparsely, and, ideally, not at all.

I write articles on new research papers, and always provide a direct link to the PDF,; but nearly all major sites fail to do this, even when the paper turns out to be at Arxiv, or otherwise directly available (instead of having been an exclusive preview offered to the publication by the researchers, as often happens at more prominent publications such as Ars and The Register).

In regard to the few publishers that do provide legal PDFs in articles, the solution I see most often is that the publication hosts the PDF itself, keeping the reader in their ecosystem. However, since external PDFs can get revised and taken down, this could also be a countermeasure against that.

Articles about patent infringement are similarly annoying when the patent numbers aren't cited. This is basic 21st century journalism 101. We aren't limited to what fits on a broadside anymore.

We need an AI driven extension that will insert the links. This would be a nice addition to Kagi as they could be trusted to not play SEO shenanigans.

I think one of the lessons of Wikipedia, is the more you link out the more they come back.

People come to your site because it is useful. They are perfectly capable of leaving by themselves. They don't need a link to do so. Having links to relavent information that attracts readers back is well worth the cost of people following links out of your site.

Wikipedia eventually failed.

What do you mean? It's one of the most popular sites

Interesting example, as Google used to link to Wikipedia much more prominently, then stopped doing that, which dropped Wikipedia's visitor counts a lot. A very large percentage of Wikipedia's visits are Google referrals.

Google shifted views that used to go to Wikipedia first to their in-house knowledge graph (high percentages of which are just Wikipedia content), then to the AI produced snippets.

All to say, yes...Wikipedia's generosity with outbound links is part of the popularity. But they still get hit by this "engagement" mentality from their traffic sources.

I think they're called broadsheets unless you're in the headline!

I won't call it dead, but it is declining. Their various sources of traffic are now regurgitating Wikipedia Content (and other 3rd party sources) via uncited/unlinked AI "blurbs"...instead of presenting snippets of Wikipedia contents with links to Wikipedia to read more.

It's not the only reason their traffic is declining, but it seems like a big one.

It's depressing how much of the web didn't work the way it was supposed to. Attention is centralized on news websites because news can be posted on social media feeds every day. Those news articles never link to other websites due to arbitrary SEO considerations. Google's pagerank which was once based on backlinks can't function if the only links come from social media feeds in 3 websites and none of them come from actual websites. On top of it all, nobody even knows for sure if those SEO considerations matter or not because it's all on Google's whim and can change without notice.

It's still working for me?

The web works fine it's just PACER and stuff that is garbage because there is no competition in the trash people create for the government and public apathy (or corruption, take your pick) is high.

Who cares if the traffic is declining? I don’t find Wikipedia useful because it gets lots of visits, I find it useful for the information it contains.

That's just plain old citogenesis[0][1], and has been in play for at least two decades, so I don't think it's any evidence of decline.

[0] https://xkcd.com/978/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

I don't read science/tech articles from major news outlets for this reason. They NEVER link to the papers and I always have to spend a few minutes searching for it.

This doesn't happen nearly as often on smaller sci/tech news outlets. When it does a quick email usually gets the link put in the article within a few hours.

The problem has more to do with editors. The theory is that less visits leads to less editors in the long run.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think the people that edit Wikipedia are the same people that are content with half truths from LLMs and thus no longer visiting the site. So I kinda doubt it matters much.

I would argue that this is less an example of why linking out may be bad for engagement and more an example of google abusing its intermediary/market position to keep users on their own pages longer

It's worse now with Instagram and other video apps that don't even let you link out. "link in bio" is killing the web.

People have been talking about wikipedia's decline since like 2008. It seems fine.

I'd argue that a user not having to click through is clearly a better result for the user, and that alone would be sufficient motivation to do it.

In terms of a single search, I don't think Google really benefits from preventing a click-through - the journey is over once the user has their information. If anything, making them click through to an ad-infested page would probably get a few fractions of a cent extra given how deeply Google is embedded in the ads ecosystem.

But giving the user the result faster means they're more likely to come back when they need the next piece of information, and give them more time to search for the next information. That benefits Google, but only because it benefits the user.

That's the kind if short-sighted view that's the root issue in a ton of enshittification happening around: the belief that short-term gains or benefits are all it's about. It's not sustainable to leech off of wikipedia content to fuel your own (ad in Google's) knowledge pop-ups, even if it benefits the user in that they save a single click, because that means long-term wikipedia will die out because users no longer associate the knowledge gained with wikipedia but with Google even though they had nothing to do with it apart from "stealing it".

If news on the web was journalism instead of attention seeking for ad revenue you’d be right.

Agree on the extension idea, except I’m not sure I want to see the original sensationalized content anyway. Might as well have the bot rewrite the piece in a dry style.

That’s certainly true for stack overflow, but in their case the moderators were very active in getting the negative feedback loop going.

That'd be all fine if google produced that content, but since it doesn't, once they kill off the website, what happens to the quality of their snippets? Then the user has only shitty snippets that are out of date.

They didn't cited papers directly even before the web. It's not a bounce or engagement issue.

Journalists don't make it easy for you to access primary sources because of a mentality and culture issue. They see themselves as gatekeepers of information and convince themselves that readers can't handle the raw material. From their perspective, making it easy to read primary sources is pure downside:

• Most readers don't care/have time.

• Of the tiny number who do, the chances of them finding a mistake in your reporting or in the primary source is high.

• It makes it easier to mis-represent the source to bolster the story.

Eliminating links to sources is pure win: people care a lot about mistakes but not about finding them, so raising the bar for the few who do is ideal.

Would you mind naming or even… linking to a few such outlets?

Also, Stack Overflow is a commercial website, while Wikipedia is a free (as in freedom) project. Editing Wikipedia feels like you're contributing towards "an ideal", that you're giving back something to humanity, instead of just helping somebody else getting richer.

What distinguishes journalists from storytellers?

That’s not how it works at large news orgs. Journalists will enter their articles in a CMS. From there it will get put into a workflow and seen by one or several editors who will edit things for clarity, grammar, style, etc. Links will get added at some point by an editor or automated system. There is no cabal of journalists scheming to keep links out of articles because “culture”.

If there were a culture of always including the original source, or journalists massively advocating to include the original source, then surely the CMS would cater to it. I think it's safe to draw the conclusion that most journalists don't care about it.

There’s a lot of rightly deserved criticism of the media but the OP describing journalists as conspiring to keep links out in the fear of being fact checked by readers is simply false and indicative of not having any experience at a large news organization.

Here's a recent example from 404 Media:

https://www.404media.co/this-stunning-image-of-the-sun-could...

Visits drive revenue. Declining traffic is declining revenue. Not an issue yet, but eventually...

But there has to be some reason for original source links never appearing in journalist articles.

It's not historically done. Printed newspapers obviously didn't have links and neither did televised news. Even when the news media started publishing online, it's not like the courts were quick to post the decisions online.

And there's also the idea that you should be able to at least somewhat trust the people reporting the news so they don't have to provide all of their references. --You can certainly argue that not all reporters can or should be trusted anymore, but convincing all journalists to change how they work because of bad ones is always going to be hard.

In my niche these links are all going to indian scam sites for years and years. Right now can google "taehyung" one of the largest kpop idols and see it live. Count the indian links that have been dominating without any particular expertise thanks to google's changes (indian scammer site kickbacks etc)

It seems more malicious or intentional than only trying to gate keep. More often then not when I dig deeper into a news article referencing a scientific paper or study, the details they pull out are very much out of context and don't tell the same story as the research.

I have to assume the journalist writing such an article knows that they are misrepresenting the research to make a broader point they want to make.

I saw statistics somewhere that Wikipedia ALREADY has enough money for centuries of work (if it stops spending them on promoting wokeism).

There is also the added pressure that some organizations quietly pile on editors to keep people from clicking out to third parties at all, where their attention may wander away. Unless of course that third party is an ad destination.

Reputable news organizations are more robust against such pressures, but plenty of people get their news from (in some cases self-described) entertainment sites masquerading as news sites.

> If news on the web was journalism instead of attention seeking for ad revenue you’d be right.

That’s painting with an overly broad brush. Nevertheless, the news was relying on ads long before most people knew the word “Internet”, but there were far fewer channels to place ads back then, so in some respects news and media organizations had a captive audience in advertisers.

Mass adoption of television was effectively made possible because of advertising money.

Is it because journalists think of their special talent as talking to people to get information (which is a scarce and priviliged resource), versus reading and summarizing things that we all have access to?

So they rarely are forced to do anything but state the name of who they interviewed, and that's it. And puts them in the habit of not acknowledging what they read, as a source?

Journalists have an agenda. And they are not independent.

They certainly can put links in stories and frequently do, just not to primary sources.

Fantastic, thanks.