I came across an interesting stat that Wikipedia pops up amongst the Top 10 results on:
- Google 81% of the time;
- Yahoo’s 77% of the time;
- MSN’s just 38% of the time.
In our earlier analysis on Wikipedia.org’s potential valuation if it were a for-profit, ad-supported entity, we outlined that Wikipedia.org gets a lot of incoming links by virtue of being a non-profit. Web site operators are notoriously stingy with outbound links, that’s a sad state of affairs. When Google launched, Ad Sense did not exist (obviously) and as such, traffic in itself had little value. Today, with Ad Sense, traffic is automatically equal to revenue, so website operators tend to hesitate before linking to a website. As such, Google’s Pagerank tends to emphasize either a site like Wikipedia.org that is not at all commercial or pages on amazon.com whose affiliate program allows the linking website to get a cut of the potential transaction. This has been my number one concern for traffic flow on the Web since I began to work in the search engine industry in 2000.
Because Google’s Pagerank technology puts a heavy emphasis on inbound links, Wikipedia.org gets a lot more “votes” than any other site. The instant Wikipedia.org becomes a money making machine, other sites would be less inclined to link to it. Note that Craigslist.org for example links to Wikipedia.org’s respective city entry off each page, now ask yourself: what is the chance of that happening if Wikipedia.org ran ads?
Exactly, none.
Yahoo!’s algorithm puts less emphasis on inbound links and as such, Wikipedia.org pops up less frequently on the main page.
And what about MSN Search? Why does Wikipedia.org pop up much less frequently on the main page? I am no software engineer or computer programmer but based on my not-so-scientific analysis, I have noticed that MSN Search is a search engine whose algorithm puts much less emphasis on metadata as well inbound links. This is a good thing and one reason why I think MSN Search is a very good search engine.
Everytime I launch a new site:
- I try different amounts of metadata on each site;
- I test each search engine to see how quickly each one indexes the new websites.
MSN Search is far and away the best at indexing content regardless of metadata and how long a site’s been up.
Note one thing, Google might index a site quasi-instantly, but because its algorithm looks at inbound links (and getting such inbound links takes time if not done by a so-called “black hat” online marketing agency) then it takes a lot of time for Google to index a page on its first page of results. Google’s first results page is more of a reference results page: a page listing which websites are linked to for a given query term.
In this context, MSN clearly gets the edge when it comes to which search engine quickly retrieves the best results no matter how many or little other websites link to.
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November 1st, 2006 at 8:51 am
Correct me if I’m wrong, but both MSN and Yahoo rely on Meta information. As for Google this is far less important.
This again, leads to that it’s easier to get a better ranking for MSN and Yahoo if you use alot of Meta keywords. But in Google’s case it’s more important to have good content.