Wikipedia Search Results - Reality Check

Steve Rubel recently posted on (what he considers to be) the influence of Wikipedia wrt brands on the web. The basic point he wants to make is that search results for a certain set of brands often include Wikipedia results and so Wikipedia has a lot of influence. He further notes some entries which contain potentially damaging content about brands.

However, Graywolf followed this up with a look at the click through rates for searches on these brands in the AOL search data and found that people don't generally click through to those results. It isn't too much of a stretch to then claim that Wikipedia actually doesn't have any influence - perhaps people see the result and decide not to go there due to some preconceptions regarding the content found on Wikipedia.

I suspect that part of the problem here is a lack of understanding of intent: search engines, due to their narrow interfaces, have no ability to disambiguate intention. If searches for a brand were intended to find items for sale, for example, Wikipedia would not be a good result. If they were intended to find blog posts or reviews, again, Wikipedia would not be a good result. If, on the other hand, they were looking for historical or other factual information - no problem.

[Via Emergence Media.]

Comments

[Max Kalehof]

Matt,
To Steve's point, though which his analysis near completely fails to support, check out this anaysis I did back when I was working with Hitwise on their search behavioral data:

Wikipedia: The Ultimate Search Magnet

The Hitwise report revealed something else intriguing: With nearly 600,000 "living" articles to date, Wikipedia's orderly collection of consumer-created content is becoming a high-powered magnet for Internet searches. A ranking of all Web sites based on the total volume of traffic received directly from search engines placed Wikipedia at 146 in June 2004. But in September 2004 it jumped in the ranking to 93; 71 in December 2004; and in March 2005, it was the 33rd most popular site in terms of visits received from search engines.

More details from a column I wrote on the analysis here: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=30253&art_search=

The fact is that relative to all sites, it does get signifacant click through, though that's against a very long-tail average. However, there is some validity to the shear placement of the link's headline. That is an impression that has some influence, just as an advertisement unconsciously does when it flashes in front of your eyes over and over again.

I should ask Hitwise to re-run the data.

[Daniel R]

Matt,

Thanks for the mention!

Max, great follow-up on the article. Let us know what numbers you find.

Cheers,

Daniel