AND GUESS WHAT COMES UP WHEN YOU TYPE 'WIKIPEDIA': Wikipedia is, like, really popular, according to an article in the spring issue of the quarterly journal Education Next. Michael J. Petrilli, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, selected 100 terms from prominent U.S.- and world-history textbooks and typed them into Google. "The results are astounding," Mr. Petrilli wrote in the journal, which is published by Hoover. "Google listed Wikipedia as the No. 1 hit a remarkable 87 times out of 100. The encyclopedia came in second 12 times, and third once. In other words, the Wikipedia site was listed among the top three Google hits 100 percent of the time."
I have been trying to understand the rather rapid rise of Wikipedia entries in Google searches starting in 2007. In mere months, every search I did went generating no Wikipedia results to having them at the top of the list.
Anybody know what changed?
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Comments (4)
Here in Germany, Wikipedia entries went down. I guess that's because Google tries to promote it's own Knol.
Unfortunately Knol's "experts" seem to be experts on PR more than anything else. Even Wikipedia, with all it's drawbacks is better than that, albeit only marginally.
Did Wikipedia just hit a popularity "tipping point" and get a lot more incoming links through 2007? Could it be that simple?
The top few returns in Google aren't produced algorithmically, but by editor choice.
I thought there was some kind of loose partnership announced a few years back between G and WP, which might have led to a more rapid indexing of WP articles (ie, G receives a direct feed of new article content). I'll try to dig that up.
Also, given the heavy linking both to and within WP, I suspect the PageRank of any WP page is quite high (for better or worse), pushing them up to the top of the results page.