Saturday, August 12, 2006

Nick Carr wonders how big Wikipedia can get

While Chris Anderson is focusing our attention to the long tail, other trends keep pushing attention toward the head. Ranking in search engine results, for example, has a huge impact on traffic. The recent scandalous release of search data by AOL provides--in addition to lists of creepy searches--some basis for analysis. Nick Carr points to SEO Black Hat, where they crunched through the AOL data to determine that the result at the top of the list gets an average of 41% of the click-throughs.

Search on anything in Google these days, and a prominent result is likely to be a Wikipedia article. Carr looks at this trend and wonders whether we'll reach a point where people go directly to Wikipedia first. Is Wikipedia a threat to Google?

A typical Widipedia entry has numerous outside links. How often are they followed?

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