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This week's Science of Search column is live on the TIME.com website (here). I'm sure this will touch a nerve with some, but in the article I decided to talk about a trend that we've noticed in the Hitwise Research group, that search term data and traffic patterns indicated that a good portion of visits to Wikipedia were coming from school-aged children most likely researching homework and school projects.
Here's a chart that didn't make it into the column. The growth rate for Wikipedia.org over the last two years was over 680%. The blue line represents U.S. visits to Wikipedia.org, the red line shows the % of visits that Wikipedia received from Google. As of last week, Wikipedia.org was the #1 external domain visited from the Google main search page (after images.google.com). Does anyone know why there was a massive surge in search to Wikipedia in July 2005?
At the Web 2.0 expo coming up in April I'll be providing some very interesting data-points on Wikipedia and the demographic differences between readers and editors.
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Posted by Bill Tancer at 08:51 PM | 
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Wikipedia has been performing extremely well in Google's SERP for the last two years. In the last year, they rank in the top few for searches on a ridiculous number of search terms. Show up number 1 for a query and you will get a lot of traffic! There have been numerous threads on Webmaster World, Threadwatch, etc. about this phenomenon.
The simple explanation is that Wikipedia enjoys tremendous Authority and Trust Rank, so almost any page on Wikipedia ranks well. That's what happens when you have 25 Million links to your site, including 250,000 from .edu domains and another 12,000 from .gov domains (Yahoo! data).
Getting a lot of clicks on Google also creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop, since Google tracks user behavior through the toolbar and click behavior on the SERP. Presumably, that data is fed back into the ranking algorithm.
Posted by JStein | March 8, 2007 01:54 PM
I talked to Wikipedia around that spike you note, and I believe there was a deal going on whereby Wikipedia results began to receive special shelf space in Google results. http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art;_aid=30253
Posted by Max Kalehoff | March 1, 2007 10:48 PM