On 10/24/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Out of 106,813 accesses to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ loads of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search? account for 9674 of them.
Veering off-topic, as always, are you able to determine how many of these are intentional and how many are a case where the user probably expected to get an article rather than the search page (cf. "search" and "go" buttons, "&go=Go" in the url, etc.)
Of course this makes the inappropriate assumption that more than a small fraction of site *readers* are familiar enough with the mw software to know the difference.
But the point I was trying to make is that our built-in search sucks and if anybody who knows what they're doing is looking for something specific on Wikipedia they'll skip that step and go straight to google anyway.
—C.W.