Hitwise Intelligence - LeeAnn Prescott - US
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February 16, 2007
Google Traffic To Wikipedia up 166% Year over Year
We have been asked to shed some insight on how much traffic Wikipedia receives from Google. Hitwise data showed that for the week ending Feb 10, 2007, 70% of Wikipedia's upstream visits came from search engines, with 50% from Google alone. Google's share of Wikipedia's upstream traffic from Google has increased by 19% over the past year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06), at the same time that Wikipedia's market share of US visits increased by 143%.
If it seems like Google is sending more traffic to Wikipedia than in the past, it's because it is. The percentage of Google's downstream traffic going to Wikipedia increased by 166% year over year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06). Last week Wikipedia was the #3 website in Google's downstream, after Google Image Search and MySpace.
Note: all data referred to is US only. www.wikipedia.org includes en.wikipedia.org. Other language sites tracked separately.
Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 03:08 PM
Posted to Education | Search
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» Wikipedia Love from Google from Google Inside
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Tracked on February 19, 2007 12:24 AM
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Tracked on May 15, 2007 01:16 PM
Comments
Wow, that's a serious increase. However, if Wikipedia's share of U.S. traffic visits was up by 143%, but Google's downstream traffic to Wikipedia was up 166%, wouldn't that mean that other search engine's share downstream share increases were probably much lower than 143%?
I've always noticed that Wikipedia articles seem to get ranked much higher in Google than other search engines, to me your analysis shows this.
Posted by: Anita at February 16, 2007 09:25 PM
Very informative.
Google might want to capture this traffic for themselves at some point.
Google may be somewhat restricted in just blatantly copying the entire Wikipedia into a wikipedia.google.com and slapping ads on it for their own profit.
However Google could establish a new non-profit organization for this purpose that would do Wikipedia with ads and use this new organizations revenue for some desired purpose.
Hans Lysglimt
http://www.lysglimt.com
Posted by: Hans Lysglimt at February 18, 2007 04:25 AM
It's interesting how myspace sends wikipedia as much traffic as ASK. Is that because myspace users are linking-to wikipedia OR is it because of people using myspace to search?
Posted by: peter caputa at February 19, 2007 10:33 AM
Will the fact that Google recently added a function so that if you add "info" to your search term any Wikipedia entry is ranked first make this increase even higher?
Posted by: Nick Reynolds at February 19, 2007 10:54 AM
Well, it's kinda obvious. Wikipedia is becoming to be a much better resource everyday, just like Google.
Posted by: mark at February 21, 2007 12:53 AM
It'd be interesting to graph the traffic to Wikipedia as compared to the number of pages on Wikipedia. More traffic without a corresponding increase in pages would validate anecdotal evidence that Wikipedia's influence is growing.
Posted by: Marios Alexandrou at February 21, 2007 09:49 PM
Wikipedia is growing rapidly and Google is the only search engine that is trying to keep up with this growth.
Posted by: Alex at March 6, 2007 01:37 AM
I'm personally fed up with Wikipedia being always on top of Google results and I think this decreases the relevancy of Google itself and the fun of discovering new sites thanks to Google searches.
After long searches, I've found a way to hide remove block Wikipedia pages from Google results.
It's a Firefox extension called Google Customize http://www.customizegoogle.com/ that allows this.
Just add http://*wikipedia.org/* to the filter section of the options of this add-on and you'll be all set.
Posted by: Ant at March 13, 2007 11:33 AM
