{"id":566,"date":"2006-10-31T14:38:55","date_gmt":"2006-10-31T21:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=566"},"modified":"2006-10-31T14:38:55","modified_gmt":"2006-10-31T21:38:55","slug":"evidence_of_att","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=566","title":{"rendered":"Evidence of attraction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few months, I’ve made a number of observations, starting here<\/a>, about the growing dominance of Wikipedia over search engine results for common terms. My findings were anecdotal, drawn from the searches I do day-in and day-out as well as a few dozen random ones I did for the express purpose of checking Wikipedia’s rank. Everything I saw seemed to point to an emerging Wikipedian search supremacy, but of course I was seeing only a tiny fraction of searches. It would have been nice to have a more rigorous sample.<\/p>\n

Well, now we have such a sample, thanks to a student in Slovenia by the name of Jure Cuhalev. In a research project, Cuhalev gathered a random sample of about 1,000 of the 1.4 million topics covered by Wikipedia. He then ran the terms through the Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines. He found that Wikipedia did in fact appear with remarkable consistency in the upper reaches of search results. On average, the online encyclopedia appeared in the top-ten search results 65% of the time – and 26% of the time it actually had two results in the top ten. (Cuhalev has posted a summary<\/a> of his findings on his blog, and the full report can be downloaded here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

But the findings get more interesting when you look beyond the averages to the particular results turned in by each of the three engines. It turns out that Google’s algorithm absolutely adores Wikipedia and that Yahoo’s passion for the online encyclopedia is nearly as ardent. But Microsoft’s MSN algorithm seems strikingly less enchanted by Wikipedia’s charms. Wikipedia turned up in Google’s top ten a whopping 81% of the time and in Yahoo’s 77%, but it appeared in MSN’s top ten just 38% of the time. What’s up with that?<\/p>\n

Cuhalev also found that when Wikipedia does turn up in the top ten it tends to rank very highly indeed. It’s in the top three results 76% of the time at Yahoo, 66% at Google, and 54% at MSN.<\/p>\n

I hope other researchers will look at this phenomenon from different angles, and also track changes over time, but in the meantime we now have the first solid evidence that, for Google and Yahoo at least, Wikipedia rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last few months, I’ve made a number of observations, starting here, about the growing dominance of Wikipedia over search engine results for common terms. My findings were anecdotal, drawn from the searches I do day-in and day-out as well as a few dozen random ones I did for the express purpose of checking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}