On 5/2/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Search engine hits explain that article pretty well, by the way - compare the hit rate for "Wikipedia". For better or worse, people think we are simply called "wiki"; the very high hit rate for [[Wiki]] will be people *searching for Wikipedia generally*, not finding Wikipedia articles in search results.
(It may seem a little odd to those of us used to manually entering URLs, but remember a staggeringly large fraction of users search for specific sites in order to get to them...)
Ah, I like that explanation. Though I think some people misinterpret stats like those showing how many people apparently "google" for "google". It's just that in Firefox and other browsers, you can type search terms directly in the address bar. So, why type "en.wikipedia.org" when you can type "wiki".
Heh, you know, it's actually not a bad idea. In FF, that takes you straight to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki . I wonder if it would be worth our attempting to detect this sort of search-engine magic and redirecting people back to the Main Page?
I note also that when you search for 'wiki' in google, a "submatch" is the WP main page. That's not normal...
Steve