I didn't know this was going on (admittedly I don't follow Google's potentially-evil activities as much as WP's). But this seems to be suggesting that Google may be backing away from giving preferential rankings to crowdsourced websites.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1734184/googles...-yahoos-content...and yet, the guy from Yahoo! says that Yahoo!Answers traffic has gone up. And if we assume that Wikipedia's traffic is likely to be unchanged (like Jimbo seems to be suggesting), then clearly Google either hasn't quite got it right, or they're being highly selective about who's going to get dinged - as usual, if you ask me. Nevertheless, this is probably something that should be encouraged.
It's worth noting that the majority of Yahoo!Answers pages are about pop culture, just as Wikipedia heavily emphasizes pop culture (at the expense of business-related topics, among others). Jimbo says the "majority of the crap" is on sites with pages about "how do I refinance my mortgage" - so if Google agrees with him, then it isn't much of a leap to interpret this as an attempt by Google to knock down their own competition in the corporate-parasite sector. In other words, banks would rather have potential customers look for answers to refinancing questions on
their websites, not some crowdsourced "how-to" aggregator site, and Google has presumably determined that their own income is obtained mainly from the banks, not the aggregators.
If so, then this could be the first, or the first
visible, step in a kind of corporate shakeout that will leave the internet looking more like the pre-internet world, at least in terms of commercial web activity. Google's role would be somewhat like AT&T's, prior to the monopoly breakup. Personally, I suspect this would be a slight improvement over the way things are now, even though I have little faith in Google's desire to do the right thing.
Then again, I'm probably reading too much into it.