I stumbled upon it this morning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran), see the “Website” entry in the box on the side. I don’t know if it’s one of the fortran-lang contributors that made an edit, but nevertheless nice to see.
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Great!
I have seen that it also appears on the French page, German, Spanish…
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This is a huge deal!
I haven’t put it there either. Doesn’t wikipedia provide history of all changes?
As discussed several times, my approach was to keep at providing good content, building the community, and people would eventually take it as the default Fortran website.
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Yes, in the history tab we can see that the culprit is:
09:12, 2 May 2020 86.67.213.80 talk 88,387 bytes +97 →External links: added the new fortran-lang.org undo
Seems to come from France:
https://whois.toolforge.org/gateway.py?lookup=true&ip=86.67.213.80
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Our next milestone is to get fortran-lang somewhere near the top when one searches Google for Fortran. Right now for me (in incognito mode) it is near the bottom of the second page.
But we will get there, it just takes time.
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On DuckDuckGo it ranks #12 for “Fortran”, which is near the top of the second page. The website listing on Wikipedia should help significantly with the search engine ranking.
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Same for me in DDG. I am happy to modify our goal to reach to the top in any search engine.
As you suggested in your first post, the goal is the quality of the content. The ranking is just your reward 
. It will go up as new contents of high quality are accumulated.
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#1 is only a matter of time! 
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This is nice!
I recently mention the Fortran-lang website on several Facebook groups. Hopefully they will check it and come to this page 
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On July 23, we ranked close to #20 on Google and #12 on Duck Duck Go.
I just looked up the search engine ranking again (in privacy mode, no cookies, search for “fortran”):
- Google: #9
- Duck Duck Go: #2
- Qwant: #2
- Search Encrypt: #4
I think this is tremendous progress in only 3 months. On Google we are now on the first page, and on other 3 privacy-oriented search engines we are very near #1. Recall that we started the website in April. Getting indexed by search engines was the first important milestone because it allows people who don’t know about the website to discover it. Getting to the first page was the next important milestone–most people don’t even look past the first page. So this has significantly improved our visibility.
I think we’ve been successful in part thanks to consistently making quality content: Learning resources and constantly growing GitHub repositories that are being linked to and from the website. It is also probably thanks to Fortran not being a popular search term, so there was some unoccupied land to take.
The next milestone is to get to #1 on all relevant search engines. This is within reach. When we get there, we will get even more interest from new users. Now whoever searches for Fortran will be directed to fortran-lang.org first.
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Also the Wikipedia page now uses our Fortran logo! Again, that’s a big win.
I agree with Milan, we have now finished the first stage of our Fortran bootstrap, which was to bootstrap the initial community, get on people’s radar and get initial momentum. We are now in the second stage, which is to get to number #1 in all search engines, keep the momentum, and leverage our community to improve Fortran: the goal should be that people stop asking you “why Fortran”, and everybody will see Fortran as a viable language to use for new projects.
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- In Bing (opened in a private window), it appears at the top of the second page.
But note that your language/country can have a great impact on the ranking, especially if it is not english! Even in a private windows, the engines know where you are on the planet… and tend to serve content in your language. In the case of a “Fortran” search, I will generally obtain ~50% of the results in English, ~50% in French.
But in Qwant, I can not find Fortran-lang, except if I choose another country in the country menu. Choosing UK or US and it is second after Wikipedia Fortran page. And it is very strange, because it is at the third place if I choose Germany or Italy… And for Belgium, where ~40% people are native french speakers, Fortran-lang is a the second rank… It seems the Qwant ranking algorithm is different for France… Very interesting…
Keep up the great work !
P.s. I didn’t know the little French Qwant was known and used in the USA…
I only learned about it recently when I saw the Netflix documentary Social Dilemma.
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I like Qwant. When I am not satisfied, I add a !g or !ddg to do the search in Google or DuckDuckGo.
And for kids you have https://www.qwantjunior.com/ , although I don’t know if there is a US version.
I tried https://www.qwantjunior.com from the US and fortran-lang is at 3rd place. Second place is https://fortran.developpez.com/.
So it looks like all we have to do is to have a French translation of our webpage, and French search engines will index it higher.
On a serious note, I think it’s a good idea to have translations of our webpage, but later. Once we become #1 in the US and have more traction, we will get more users and more users willing to maintain translations to other languages.
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Good, so Fortran is also for kids! I have seen that in Qwant Junior you can choose the american flag. You will have an english interface, US news for kids, etc. Note that this search engine is the official engine in french schools.
I agree with you concerning making translations in the future. One step at a time…
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