Nielsen Online has released data showing that Wikipedia's 8,000% growth in the past 5 years is attributed to search. Really? Is that what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1? I had no idea.
Breaking down the not-at-all suprising data:
Google sent the most search traffic to en.wikipedia.org with 61% of searches on home computers and 66% of work computers. Yahoo came in second at 19% home, 16% work. The main www.Wikipedia.org came in third, beating out MSN and AOL at home and search.MSN.com and search.Live.com at work.
Wikipedia's growth is slowing, however. Here's data for unique visitors in the month of April for the past six years with the year-over-year growth percentages:
2003 700,000, n/a
2004 2,082,000, 197%
2005 6,753,000, 224%
2006 25,970,000, 285%
2007 45,934,000 77%
2008 55,820,000 17%
Related Reading:
Powerset Launches Piggybackipedia: Wikipedia Search Engine
Wikipedia External Links Now "Nofollow"
Ten Reasons Marketers Should Pay Attention to Wikipedia
