Comments on: Just How Powerful Is Wikipedia?

By: ukwebdesign

ukwebdesign — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:28:50 +0000

soome nice articles here btw... by web design

By: Lego

Lego — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 00:58:21 +0000

The fact Wikipedia outranks sites written by Nobel prize winners, etc says it all, Google is useless, link power was fine a deacade ago, but everybody got wise to it a ling time ago and it is now pretty worthless, just like Google’s search results, still I am sure the sub-standard results increase the clickthrough rate for the ads, so no doubt google are happy…

By: leoschmidt08

leoschmidt08 — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:52:16 +0000

Has anyone noticed how Yahoo! Answers is showing up more for searches and seems to be competing (in some areas) with Wikipedia? With that said, I still think Wikipedia is very powerful in shaping public perception.

By: FredBauder

FredBauder — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:09:47 +0000

You say “So for the top 50 search terms, Google thinks Wikipedia is authoritative on every single one of them.” Google doesn’t think any such thing. It knows from spidering websites that there are more links to that Wikipedia article then to other sites regarding those search terms.

By: simsim

simsim — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:22:07 +0000

That’s apparently obvious to me as almost every search I do in Google for public concern keywords almost always yields a Wikipedia entry in the top 10 results.

By: Charles Sweeney

Charles Sweeney — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:24:20 +0000

I have noticed just from my own use that Google strongly favours Wikipedia. Beats me why. It seems to suggest that Wikipedia is a reliable source, which of course it isn’t.

By: Czaries

Czaries — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:31:26 +0000

@Anonymous and Stormrider:

I have a niche website where for a long time before it was well established, the #1 source of traffic was a link from a related Wikipedia entry. Who cares about PR? The link helped to establish my website – that is real, measurable value.

BTW – The website was jscompress.com, an online javascript code compression site.

By: lastcraft

lastcraft — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:22:36 +0000

Hi…

Try the Wordtracker top 1000 list with the much stronger “remove dubious”.

The “remove offensive filter” filters only the most obviously graphic terms. An important use-case for Wordtracker is niche finding. This makes us hesitant to filter very much by default.

If you are doing something statistical or for public consumption (as here) you want to use the stronger filter. The filter does need an update though, as redtube still comes top :(.

Any chance you could run it again? I’d love to know the percentage with full filtering on.

yours, Marcus

By: Josh Catone

Josh Catone — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:10:12 +0000

@Anonymous and Stormrider: passing Google PR isn’t the only thing that makes a link valuable…

By: artemis

artemis — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:58:01 +0000

I often rely on Google for searching within wikipedia rather than their own built in search and to garuntee a result I usuall type the search term followed by the word wiki. It is rare that most users need an absolutely and scientifically correct answer to want they want to know and in this respect Wikipedia excels. That Google sends so many people there, I am not surprised at all.