Hello everyone,
I have conducted a comparative Search Engine Result Page (SERPs)
across 9 Chinese geo-linguistic variants, with the aim to compare the
ranking of Baidu Baike versus Chinese Wikipedia.
From my limited research and own personal experience, the Google (or
Baidu for that matter) does have more or less the same ranking for a
geo-linguistic region/variant. Then if you happen to log in with your
Google account, your SERPs will deviate from the geo-linguistic norm.
Thus, I argue that the difference of SERPs are first determined by the
geo-linguistic parameters and then other "personalization" parameters.
There is a slight difference with Google using the same
geo-linguistic region/variant but from different IP address, but the
difference, as I have observed from my data, is negligible if the goal
is to compare the general patterns....
As for the ranking, I have constructed a measurement of visibility
scores based on click-through-rates (CTR) on the SERP ranking, thereby
allowing researchers to convert ranking to a measurement that is much
closer to traffic measurement.
User-generated encyclopedias are proved to be the most visible for
my sample of keywords, especially for those search keywords gathered
from the index of Cambridge encyclopedia of China. For other topics,
user-generated encyclopedias are still prominent, though not as much.
Top three websites are all user-generated encylopedias:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kebl3178/uge_top3_zh.png
Baidu Baike is much more visible for Baidu of course. Chinese
Wikipedia for other geo-linguistic regions. You can have a look at the
visualization of the visibility scores here:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kebl3178/
Finally, the rule of thumb is, if the search query is somehow
related to the name or alternative name of an entry, then it is very
likely to show up among SERPs.
I always hope that other researchers can collaborate on a
comparative cross-geo-linguistic project on this, to see whether
Wikipedia is visible across the globe, and also for other non-Google
search engines such as Baidu and Yandex or Naver.....
Best,
han-teng liao
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 1:11 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 3:41 PM, Taha Yasseri
<taha.yaseri(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Asaf,
Back to your original question,
Isn't "google rank" a user dependent parameter? I think depending on the
history of clicks and other personalized preferences, how Google presents
the results changes from user to user. So the term of "being first or second
or ..." google hit sounds something symbolic and non measurable and
generalizable to me.
Is it? That hasn't always been true, but I guess it is likely true
today. So I guess generalizing from traffic-from-Google does make more
sense... I wonder how much it varies for factual queries though, for
instance if you are looking up something scientific or that isn't
likely to be for sale. (we should run an informal test to see if
people on this list get different results!)
Haitham: thanks for the info, though isn't 23% way way too low? I
thought our rule of thumb was that 70-80% of the traffic comes from
google searches. I'm not sure of the exact number offhand, but I would
be very surprised if it was only 23%.
Anyway, I think my original question is a useful one lots of
fields/applications, though my immediate interest is for the library
literature, which has a habit of breaking down or differentiating
"people who start their search with google" and "people who start
their search with Wikipedia". I'd like to argue that this is
essentially the same thing in many (most) cases, since so many google
searches result in Wikipedia results front and center, and we know
from lots of other work (SEO and HCI alike) that people rarely go
beyond the first few results.
cheers,
phoebe
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