Category: Technology Author : Duncan Riley Posted: May 14, 2008
Tags : google, google knol, wikipedia
New figures released by Nielsen Online so that all but 10% of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from search engines and other sites, and that most of that traffic comes from Google.
Referrals from Google make up 61% of all visitors to Wikipedia from homes, and 66% from work places. Yahoo delivers 19% and 16% respectively.
Wikipedia’s reliance on search traffic has been long known, but with Google Knol on the way (eventually) this year, any decision to down grade Wikipedia’s place in Google’s search results in favor of Knol could easily wipe out over half of the sites traffic overnight.
May 15, 2008
I use google to search wikipedia. if knol pages start showing up i’ll just search directly from wikipedia. they’re not going to lose “my” traffic, so i think you have a false presupposition.
May 15, 2008
I remember hearing about Wikipedia first through Google searches. I used to wonder why it would come up at the top of most results.
May 16, 2008
“…any decision to down grade Wikipedia’s place in Google’s search results in favor of Knol…”
I’m sure that any “downgrade” of Wikipedia’s placement won’t be due to a Google “decision”. Their search results are too valuable to mess around with by cheating the system for their own site’s benefit. If Knol results rank highly, it’ll be because of the included content, just like any other result.