Search Google without wikipedia – a Firefox search plugin
Recently there has been quite a stir within the SEO community with people seeing a huge dominance of wikipedia in the Google search results (Graywolf has been one of the more vocal critics recently with a whole load of posts – although he’s been writing about it for some time).
But don’t just take Greywolf’s word for it – there’s plenty of articles about this, most notably recently the google cache wrote about how 96.6% of wikipedia articles rank in the top 10 of google.
It has been noticed outside the world of SEO as well – PR Blogger has just written an analysis of Fortune 100 companies’ wikipedia pages.
Remove Wikipedia from Google for Good
Here at Distilled, it’s something that came up in conversation a few times, so we decided to do something about it – we have created a Firefox search plugin that enables you to search Google without getting wikipedia results. We call it ‘Google without wikipedia’ and if you’re running Firefox, you should be able to install it by clicking here.
(If that doesn’t work, you can download the files you need and add them manually to your search plugins folder: google-wikipedia.src and google-wikipedia.png.)
Once installed – simply search from your firefox search box:
And you’ll get Google – only without any wikipedia results!
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Stubot on Tue (10 Jul) @ 9:43 am
Yes! At last a way to rid the (search) world of Wikipedia. Now if you could do the same to Ebay…
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Will Critchlow on Tue (10 Jul) @ 11:35 am
We could do an ebay one (and a wikipedia+ebay one and…). Let us know what you want!
I also have a google.co.uk minus wikipedia one nearly ready.
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Single Grain on Wed (11 Jul) @ 4:46 pm
Finally. When will the day come when we wont have to use this plugin
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dlperry on Thu (12 Jul) @ 8:47 pm
Oh Yes Please – one with no wikipedia AND no ebay would be lovely, thank you
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SEO Honolulu on Thu (12 Jul) @ 9:23 pm
Now that is an awesome idea! Any way to rid the search results of those annoying about dot com results too?
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Tom Critchlow on Thu (12 Jul) @ 10:08 pm
I’d be happy to get rid of ebay results as well – although they do at least tend to be VAGUELY useful for most searches. I’m happy to remove wikipedia, for ebay I’d rather just see a ‘dampening’ of their rankings to stop them ranking so highly for random things!
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Will Critchlow on Fri (13 Jul) @ 4:56 am
I’ll look at both of those. I’m not sure if we can do ‘dampening’ of rankings, but I’ll have a look.
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Igor Klajo on Fri (13 Jul) @ 8:50 am
This is awesome. Yeah it would be great for ebay aswell. I don´t know how much work it is and how much time you have to crete it, but what about an extension where you would have an option to enable and/or disable the filter for certain websites. Have checkboxes for let´s say google.com, google.co.uk, . . . . ebay.com, ebay.co.uk etc. etc. etc.
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Will Critchlow on Fri (13 Jul) @ 12:34 pm
Ha. That sounds hard Igor. I’ll have a think. Nice suggestion!
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Nick on Fri (13 Jul) @ 6:39 pm
This seems kind of outrageous to me. Wikipedia is a valuable online resource. I don’t know how many times a day I use it learn about something I need to know. It’s also more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica. It’s also an example of things to come because real brains are providing you with content as opposed to Google’s super secretive logarithm that cannot mimic the filtering capabilities of a real human being. I’ve enjoyed this site and what it provides, but this seems a little “snarky” to me. Would you rather have Google search results to be dominated by paid advertisements. Google is pretty much the biggest marketing firm in the world anyways…Twice as evil as Microsoft and even more secretive.
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Nick on Fri (13 Jul) @ 6:41 pm
…the internet is for everyone not just the SEO community!
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Tom Critchlow on Fri (13 Jul) @ 7:50 pm
Hi Nick, thanks for taking the time to comment – however I think you may have slightly missed the point of our plugin. I agree that wikipedia can be an incredibly useful tool and I even use it myself to research various information (although I will always try and look at more than just the one resource).
The problem that I have, and which the SEO community is riling against is the sheer dominance of wikipedia in the search results. if you read some of Grey Wolf’s posts he highlights how wikipedia appears for searches where it’s clear the user isn’t looking for an informational resource.
If I want to see wikipedia results I know where to find them, if I’m looking for something else, I’ll use Google – and that’s where this plugin comes in handy
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Nick on Fri (13 Jul) @ 7:52 pm
Thanks for the clarification. I apologize for the “snarky” comment.
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Tom Critchlow on Fri (13 Jul) @ 9:39 pm
No problems Nick – I’d much rather have open commentary than feel people didn’t want to comment. After all, constructive criticism is often the most helpful!
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Will Critchlow on Sat (14 Jul) @ 10:02 am
Hi Nick. Looks like Tom’s covered most of the reasons behind the plugin – and thanks for coming back and commenting again. I hope you’ll keep reading!
I just wanted to echo what Tom said about the usefulness of wikipedia. I have consulted it recently on lists of Australian cities, flags of countries, mathematical theorems (in fact, I wrote a post about how great wikipedia is for mathematical stuff) so this definitely isn’t designed to criticise wikipedia.
It’s actually more of a criticism of Google. There are times when I want wikipedia to be the top result, but there are all kinds of ridiculous queries (as Tom pointed out) where Google’s algorithm is currently assigning too much weight to wikipedia (in our opinion) and so they’re ranking even when they shouldn’t be.
We’re hoping that if the SEO community raises the profile of this issue a little, that Google might take a look at it and hopefully we’ll end up with better results for all (without our plugin!).
Don’t worry about calling us snarky – we’ve been called far worse
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Wikipedia Review: Opinions and Editorials » Blog Archive » Googling in Firefox just got a whole lot better! on Sat (14 Jul) @ 6:57 pm
[...] new Firefox search plugin that removes Wikipedia results from Google searches. It’s available here from Distilled, an SEO blog, and since it’s just one little XML file it takes only a few [...]
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Froodly dooblie on Sat (14 Jul) @ 11:02 pm
What we really need is a plug-in that disables SEO for google.
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Cherubino on Tue (17 Jul) @ 12:14 am
Pingback by Wikipedia dominiert Suchergebnisse bei Google http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Kurier
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mercurythread on Tue (17 Jul) @ 11:51 am
Fantastic. This has just made my day. All I need is one that removes adwords from my page. If anyone has one let me know
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Tom Critchlow on Tue (17 Jul) @ 3:50 pm
@mecurythread – I think there is a plugin which does just that. Let me see if I can find it….
edit: found the one I was looking for but it doesn’t work anymore. Not that unsurprising
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Simon’s Blog » Blog Archive » Remove Wikipedia Search Results on Tue (17 Jul) @ 7:28 pm
[...] the first page of Google results for your all-important search? A bunch of SEO types have written a Firefox extension that will allow you to search Google without Wikipedia. Now you’ll get only the best … [...]
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Cherubino on Tue (17 Jul) @ 9:16 pm
you also should filter all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks
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Will Critchlow on Wed (18 Jul) @ 9:53 am
Hi Cherubino,
Thanks for the suggestion – so far I’ve found that most of the mirrors etc. don’t rank crazily like wikipedia.org itself does. When it ranks where it should do, I don’t see too much of a reason to keep it out of the results. Might be worth a look in the future though.
Will
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me on Tue (24 Jul) @ 4:49 pm
It’s no good idea. Because Wikipedia results are the best I hope to get on search the web. Why are free non commercial projects bad as firs results? If some pages want to earn money with the 1st Place in Google then it shouldn’t prevent google to give good results.
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Nickelo on Tue (24 Jul) @ 5:03 pm
Please also create a thunderbird plugin that allows me to only see spam mails and not the unrelevant normal mail.
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Stephans Blog » Blog Archive » Google? Yes, please … but Wikipedia free! on Tue (24 Jul) @ 5:35 pm
[...] of having Wikipedia links all over the place in your Google search? Fear not! This is the answer. Finally I can search Google again, without having the first two pages full of Wikipedia links. [...]
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micha on Tue (24 Jul) @ 5:48 pm
Where is the problem?
http://www.google.com
SEARCH: content -wikipedia -ebay -…
Every thing’s fine.
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Werth on Tue (24 Jul) @ 6:57 pm
Yes. Thank you!!!!!!!
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Will Critchlow on Wed (25 Jul) @ 6:43 am
@me & @Nickelo: In situations where you want to see wikipedia, don’t use the plugin – I often turn to wikipedia and enjoy and like it as a resource. There are, however, many searches for which wikipedia is categorically not a good result – all we are trying to do is highlight that to the powers at Google. I want wikipedia to rank for many things, but just because a page is on wikipedia doesn’t automatically make it great.
@micha: I think you’d probably want to do -site:wikipedia.org -site:ebay.com because otherwise you’d lose pages that mention wikipedia or ebay as well. It is perfectly do-able with longer queries, but if you are going to do it a lot, this would save you time (and many people aren’t comfortable constructing longer search queries).
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Geneva Information - unlizensiertes Weblog aus Genf » Search Google without wikipedia - a Firefox search plugin | Distilled blog on Wed (25 Jul) @ 8:20 am
[...] In heise.de I stumbled over an article which proposes a great firefox plugin: Search Google without wikipedia – a Firefox search plugin. [...]
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Jens Falk » Es geht auch ohne on Thu (26 Jul) @ 1:37 pm
[...] für Google und den Firefox gibt es jetzt Abhilfe. Will Critchlow hat ein Suchmaschinen-Plugin erstellt, das die Suche ohne Wikipedia ermöglicht. Das lange Scrollen durch die Suchergebnisse hat [...]
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helooo on Thu (30 Aug) @ 11:54 pm
THANK YOU!!!!!!
but i have to say i had to go through 10 searches with wikipedia on the top 3 on EVERY search to find your blog,
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FireFox SEO Extensions - the Ultimate Collection on Wed (3 Sep) @ 11:28 am
[...] Google without Wikipedia [...]
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SEO расширения для FireFox - the Ultimate Collection : SEO & Money on Sun (7 Sep) @ 8:40 am
[...] Google without Wikipedia [...]
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3 Ways to Customize Google Search in FireFox on Fri (10 Oct) @ 6:52 pm
[...] (for example, two awesome Google search plugins I already mentioned once or twice are Distilled Google without Wikipedia and Joost’s Google unpersonalized search). You can easily create your own search plugin and [...]
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Fed up of wikipedia? | vipey.com on Fri (10 Oct) @ 8:26 pm
[...] that every other word seems to be a link. Well i found a solution to the problem with a nice little firefox custom search which gets rid of wikipedia from all your searches! Share and [...]
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Cricket Bats on Sat (18 Oct) @ 9:01 pm
Whats the point of exluding Wikipedia. if its not of interest don’t click it !
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Viola on Wed (10 Dec) @ 10:37 pm
Thank you thank you thank you for this wonderful plugin!
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Tommy on Sat (14 Feb) @ 11:04 am
You don’t need a plugin, just add -keyword to your search. For example, if you want to search watches without ebay, you would go to Google and enter “watch -ebay” without quotes. Or if you want to avoid shopping sites completely, enter “watch – buy -shop”.
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Making Your Own FireFox Search Plugins & Other Tips | MakeUseOf.com on Mon (16 Feb) @ 1:02 am
[...] Google without Wikipedia – to get rid of wiki results in Google SERPs (in case you are tired of seeing wiki results all over the search results pages). [...]
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Dene on Mon (23 Feb) @ 5:32 pm
One other solution is add “-wikipedia.org” to your search query. This would filter it from the results.
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Dene on Mon (23 Feb) @ 5:33 pm
And I just noticed, at least two other people have already mentioned it …