What percentage of the time do you think Wikipedia pops up on the first page of results when you enter a Google search? 100%? 95%? At least 3 quarters of the time, right? Actually no, its less than 50% according to a recent study. The biggest reason Wikipedia doesn't appear more often is the types of searches being made. There are two different kinds, "informational" and "transactional". Of course Wikipedia dominates the results market in the informational category appearing on the first page 60% of the time but when it comes to transactional, people shopping for clothes, music, cars etc. they appear less than 40% of the time. Yes, yes I know that these percentages are still pretty high for a single source, but relative to what the perception of Wikipedia on Google it is much lower. Wikipedia may not have the stranglehold on Google as people perceive, but none the less they are a powerhouse in the informative realm of the Internet and will be for decades to come.
Check out more about the study and its process here.
Wikipedia Study
I found this to be very interesting.. I initially thought it would be a higher percentage as well. This is good to know for the future and know that Wikipedia isn't taking over so much of Google as we think.
ReplyDeleteI also thought this post is very interesting and made me slightly re-think my view of Google searches and what are the results yielded. I was in the majority of people who thought Wikipedia would be in the top three search results the vast majority of the time. However, I have never taken into account informational versus transactional searches. It makes sense that Wikipedia is usually in the top three for informational, although 60 percent was lower than I would have imagined. It also makes sense that Wikipedia would not usually be in the top of the results when it comes to transactional searches, but 40 percent is much higher than I would have thought. This made me wonder who would come up the majority of the time for transactional results. Would it be Amazon? Wal Mart? Ebay?
ReplyDeleteThis is really surprising to me. As you said, I feel like Wikipedia ALWAYS comes up first. I took the liberty of checking for myself and I saw that you are right. I guess they are not always first, but Wikipedia is almost always on the first page. I could not find an instance in which Wikipedia was not on the first page of search results. That could explain why it always seems like its first, because even if it is not actually first, the eye is drawn to it because it is familiar.
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