MSN doesn’t like Wikipedia… or Encarta
Jure Čuhalev has published some interesting results from a small study of how three search engines rank Wikipedia in a search for Wikipedia article titles.
It was inspired by comments in the blogosphere about Wikipedia appearing highly in SERPs, but doesn’t tell you much about that since the sample of searches used all came from Wikipedia article titles, and therefore biased the results towards Wikipedia. The terms searched for include words that are biased towards Wikipedia-style wikis, like “stubs” and “disambiguation”. They’re also not the sort of things people often search for, like Adenochlaena or Zakroczym.
However, what it does show is the relative status of Wikipedia in the three search engines. Google and Yahoo are far more likely to show Wikipedia in the first ten results than MSN is. Wikipedia appears in the top-10 results for 81% of Google searches, 77% of Yahoo searches and only 38% of MSN searches.
Jure Čuhalev was kind enough to run the same analysis for Wikia, using the original 1000 search terms. It shows that if you take a random 1000 Wikipedia article titles, a search for those titles will show a top-10 link to Wikia seven times on Yahoo, twice on Google and once on MSN.
A really odd result that Jure sent me by email is that MSN does not link to Encarta at all within the first 10 results for any of these 1000 queries. I’d wondered if they showed Wikipedia so infrequently compared with Google or Yahoo because they were biasing their results towards their own Encarta… but, no. They prefer Wikipedia to Encarta, but generally choose to show irrelevant junk instead of either. For example, search for Inaugural Winter Games. Google and Yahoo give hits for both Wikipedia and Encarta. MSN links to neither.
The full report of Jure’s study is at wikistatus.pdf.
Wikia
WikiChix
gabriel said,
November 2, 2006 at 1:14
Maybe is because Wikipedia is open, and the bots can index all of the content. Encarta does’t.
Angela Beesley said,
November 2, 2006 at 1:37
Encarta not being open doesn’t seem to prevent them indexing it. If you search for
“A wiki is a type of server software that enables users to create or alter content on a Web page”, you get an Encarta result in Yahoo, Google and MSN.
chrisf said,
November 9, 2006 at 8:32
Interesting, but as a follow-up question, what is your opinion regarding how good a thing it is for search engines to have Wiki and Wikipedia articles ranking highly?
Angela Beesley said,
November 9, 2006 at 14:11
It’s important that they have relevant results ranking highly, not that they necessarily link to Wikipedia highly, though since Wikipedia is so often relevant to searches for encyclopedic information, it is surprising to see MSN shows those links so much less frequently than Google or Yahoo.