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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Google holiday logos and Wikipedia growth
June 17, 2008
When looking at our Fast Moving Search Terms list a few weeks ago, I was surprised to see the term ‘walter gropius’ at the top of the list for All Categories. Why the sudden interest in the founder of the Bauhaus, the influential German art and a design school (not the goth band)? Pursuing the list last Monday I noticed that the term ‘charles rennie mackintosh’ appeared in the top 10. Why this sudden interest in classic design? The answer: Google.
Part of Google’s appeal is its clean, uncluttered user interface, but sometimes it brightens this up with a customized holiday logo celebrating an event such as St Patrick’s Day or Mothering Sunday. You may have noticed that the frequency of these customised logos has increased recently. They are now used quite often to celebrate anniversaries of historical event or the birthdays of historical figures. Recent Google doodle subjects have included Gropius and the Glaswegian art-nouveau pioneer Mackintosh, as well as slightly more geeky topics such as the invention of the LEGO brick and the first laser. When people click on one of these logos, they are effectively conducting a Google search on pre-defined term. As the chart below illustrates, a logo can seriously impact the volume of searches for the chosen term.
The term ‘lego’ experienced the smallest peak, but unlike the other terms it was already experiencing a relatively high volume of searches. ‘lego’ was also different in so far as it didn’t send a significant amount of traffic to Wikipedia, which was the top destination for ‘walter gropuis’ (35.5%) and ‘first laser’ (20.6%) searches, and the second for ‘charles rennie mackintosh’ (13.9%). The Google-Wikipedia conspiracy theorists might cite those numbers as proof that Google favours Wikipedia by assigning it an artificially high page rank. However, looking at the amount of traffic the other search engines send to the online encyclopaedia, that seems not to be the case.
The table above lists the proportion of downstream traffic that the major search engines send to Wikipedia. Yahoo UK ranks highest, followed by the two Google’s. Only Ask UK sends less than 1% of its traffic to Wikipedia, and then only by the smallest margin. All of this search traffic has certainly benefited Wikipedia, which continues to increase its market share and more up the UK rankings. As the chart below illustrates, in May it was 15th most visited website in the UK.
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:00 PM
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In Categories Education | Google | Search
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Interesting data as always! Very peculiar keywords, that's for sure!
Posted by Brick Marketing | June 17, 2008 03:18 PM