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Socialtext notices that Google search results lately are crowded with results from Wikipedia. This is because Google's algorithm inherently succumbs to the basic structure and social structure of wikis. They also note that Wikipedia - an open source medium - has a higher PageRank (definition) than any other site in Google's index.
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Steve Rubel points to an interesting post on the Socialtext blog. Google is becoming increasingly prone to Wikipedia. This is because Google's PageRank algorithm, the method by which it ranks search pages, inherently succumbs to the basic structure and... [Read More]
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The same thing for Technorati. I see quite a few searches return a link to Technorati's Tag results page for that topic.
It's a nice little side benefit from all those people tagging their posts and linking back to Technorati.
Posted by: Josh Hallett | Tuesday, October 04, 2005 at 08:41 AM
Can you provide some examples? I've noticed the opposite. I'd like to see Wikipedia articles at the top of Google results, but they're often not...so I have to run a separate Wikipedia search as well.
Posted by: Peter Morville | Tuesday, October 04, 2005 at 09:02 AM
You say that the Wikipedia has a higher PR than any other site in Google's index, but when I go to its English home page, I only see a PR3 in my toolbar.
I recognize that the toolbar isn't precise, but I'm quite sure there are pages with higher PR than that one (on Google's home page I see a PR of 10).
Socialtext makes the following statement: "I would like to demonstrate directly why I make this claim. This search returns the entire set of indexed pages on Google. Naturally, the number 1 position is the page with the highest PageRank on the entire Web."
That's simply not an accurate statment, and indicates a misunderstanding of what PageRank is.
Yes, I see more pages from Wikipedia appearing in Google's results, and yes, there are many links pointing to the site, but it does not have the highest PR of all sites in Google's index.
Posted by: Robert Gladstein | Tuesday, October 04, 2005 at 11:01 AM
Why would Wikipedia have the highest PageRank on the web? www.wikipedia.org has a PageRank 9 (and there are PageRank 10 pages out there, like Google.com or W3.org).
The English Wikipedia homepage, according to Google's Firefox toolbar, has a PageRank of 3 -- which is actually very low.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
But yes, definitely, Wikipedia results often turn up high in search results. Naturally that's because people often link to them for a specific term (say, [Sudoku], or [Canary Islands], and so on). Because those people believe Wikipedia offers the best explanation of the topic, or at least, the best approach to optimize this explanation in the future. The Wikipedia page on any subject stands out because it's sort of the semi-official democratic consensus for any one thing.
As for Wikipedia's stronly interlinked structure pushing it high up the ranks; well, it's good to have a well-connected site, but on its own it's worth zilch, like the author's admit (or else, any spammer could set up a Wiki and start dominating the world).
I find the article's use of the query [* *] to determine the "King of all pages" to be unscientific at least. If I query Google for [* * *], then "pbskids.org" will be number 1. So is this the most popular page on the web now?
Posted by: Philipp Lenssen | Tuesday, October 04, 2005 at 12:31 PM
We have acctually built a site the last year as non-profit project.
It combines a "Wikipedia" lika reference library with staff writers, with staff written news, in the area of health, environment and the third world.
The news links to other news on the same subject, as does articles, and almost everything at least reference one or two fact articles or theme pages.
The site is *strongly* inter-linked.
For some time ago we starting noticing exactly this fenomen. We can "almost" climb on anything in our usually areas.
Its especially fun that it is on a non-profit site.
Still it havent yet made into the DMOZ. Cant understand why though, maybe I lost some email when we set upp the "nyfikenvital.org-accounts".
The site is about 1500 articles big. All unique content, lot of pictures, facts, tables and stuff. All in swedish.
Well sorry for the bad english. I usually writes in swedish and sorts of forget about the english in between :-D
And thanks for a good blog and some *really* interresting information for us.
Posted by: Nyfiken vital | Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at 04:05 PM