Wikipedia Should Change Its Name To Googlepedia

Wikipedia needs Google like plants need sunshine, according to the latest traffic analysis presented by Hitwise. Half of the online publicly-edited encyclopedia's traffic comes from Google alone, with another 20 percent arising from the other search engines combined.

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Wikipedia's market share of traffic has increased by 143 percent over the last year, perhaps in part due to Stephen Colbert's constant poking at them, but also in very large part due to Google's inherent trust of the site as a quality information source.

The site's high ranking in Google's search results is evident of that trust, as well as trust around the Web in general (Wikipedia gets lots of link love), but according to a commenter on LeeAnn Prescott's blog post, it ranks a bit higher on Google than other search engine results.

A quick test of that theory, searching for the infamous "elephants" entry, shows that seems to be true for that term at least. Wikipedia's submission on elephants, Google, even above Elephants.com, the number one result at MSN, and confirms that what has appeared to be true is certainly true:

If it seems like Google is sending more traffic to Wikipedia than in the past, it's because it is. The percentage of Google's downstream traffic going to Wikipedia increased by 166% year over year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06). Last week Wikipedia was the #3 website in Google's downstream, after Google Image Search and MySpace.
So how important is it for webmasters that their site rank well on Google? Well, considering only a fifth of Wikipedia's traffic comes from the other major search engines combined, it would seem a requisite for Web survival.

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