Seek and ye shall find... Wikipedia

Wikipedia has moved in to ninth place in comScore’s recent list of the U.S.’s top websites. December, 2006, saw the online, open encyclopedia down at number 13 on the list, but it has now overtaken the likes of Viacom, The New York Times and Apple.

by Helen Leggatt

Hitwise researcher, LeeAnn Prescott, has research results showing Google is responsible for much of Wikipedia’s traffic. Results show that 50 percent of the 70 percent of hits, resulting from search queries, come from Google.

Prescott writes in her blog, “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.”

Could the recent introduction of a Google/Wikipedia OneBox feature have had a major contribution to the traffic increase? As Steve Rubel observes in his blog, Micro Persuasion, typing “info” or “information” after keywords often brings up a large Wikipedia entry at the top of the page.

All this co-operation is despite reports that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, is developing a search engine with funding from Amazon.com to rival Google and Yahoo.