I’ve been noticing more often than not that the first search results I get when I search for anything in Google or Bing is a Wikipedia article.

There are many people – yours truly included – that purposely avoid Wikipedia articles because in many instances the content there is either slightly incorrect, flat out wrong and/or I never wanted to go to Wikipedia in the first place.

Fortunately it’s easy enough to completely skirt Wikipedia articles completely in search results by using a simple search operator.

Below is what happens when I search for a simple search term like irc.

Note the immediate Wikipedia links within the first few results (sometimes listed as the #1 result).

To avoid all the Wikipedia crapola, I simply add -wikipedia to filter that stuff out:

By using the minus operator in Bing, Google or whatever search engine you use, filtering out the Wikipedia results does make for better searching.

I want to point out that the Wikipedia itself is not bad, but all the search engines include results from that site way too much.

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