Weirdness Number 1 – Google only displays 36 results for a ‘wikipedia’ search
I was trawling the referring keywords to our blog the other day and noticed that we’d had 3 clicks for the keyphrase ‘wikipedia’ following this blog post on why Wikipedia is better than Google for finding mathematical and statistical info.
That’s strange. Why would we be getting traffic for that? Do we rank for it in some strange way? I did a quick Google search for ‘wikipedia’. (Note: Originally I did the google.co.uk search, but for the purpose of this blog I’ve used the google.com rankings since most people reading this will be in the US.)
So, what did I see for a Wikipedia search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia
Ok, not that unusual – nothing strange going on here. Wikipedia is owning this SERP as expected. I carried on searching – we clearly weren’t going to be on the first page. But then I got the the 4th page and I stopped. I couldn’t go any further than 36..
Scroll to the 4th page and you see this:
Well, that’s strange. Surely there are more mentions of Wikipedia on the internet than just 36 web pages?
So, let’s recap – within these 36 results, only 11 are non-Wikipedia.org results.
Ok, you might be thinking, “Google’s just trying to show me the most relevant results, most of which are actual Wikipedia pages.” Ok, fine, let’s click on ‘show me more results.’
Weirdness Number 2 – Google only shows 2 non-Wikipedia.org results in top 200+ results
Let’s click on show me more. (My first gripe is that it takes me back to result no. 1 – surely this should keep me on page 4, right? But let’s ignore that for a second.)
Now what do we get? Well now, Google starts showing me multiple indented Wikipedia results.
Okay….. Not really convinced about that – you’re not showing me more results ABOUT Wikipedia, you’re just showing me more pages FROM Wikipedia…
Well, being the true soldier geek I am, I persevered and crawled through the top 200 results.**
Only two listings weren’t Wikipedia.org results:
technorati.com/tag/wikipedia
technorati.com/tag/Wikipedia
Which are the same result! (Aside: note the capitalisation; does Google list these separately? Ts there anything interesting/strange going on there?)
See the 20th page of results for yourself.
And it continues–I just got bored after the top 200.
Summary
What’s going on Google? – I know that Wikipedia is more or less unprecedented in its sub-domain spamming reach, but is this really the best way to handle it?
In short – how anyone ever found our blog through a ‘wikipedia’ search in Google is beyond me.*
Footnotes
*Actually I have a few ideas, limiting results to UK results and personalised search being just two of them. Having checked these, I still haven’t found our site though!
Aside no 2 – it is actually quite interesting to see which pages Google attaches to other pages, e.g. on this page – the entry for Italy (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy) is the first indented result for Windows Vista (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista), closely followed by Steve Irwin (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Irwin). I suspect this is down to internal linking passing relevance and Google attempting to determine which pages are ‘hub’ pages, the massive amount of internal linking on wikipedia makes this a tough job for Google.
