On 5/2/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)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