Two points - which don't really belong together, except for the common presence of Google:
1. I've noticed the prominence of Wikipedia results in Google searches. But I didn't anticipate the significant rise over the last few years: In 2005, for all 10 first page results, "2% of the links proposed by Google and 4% of those proposed by Yahoo came from Wikipedia. On the first link alone, Google offered no Wikipedia results (at least not in our sample) and Yahoo offered 7%.
The strategies have changed completely. Today 27% of Google’s results on the first link alone come from Wikipedia, as do 31 % of Yahoo’s. "
If increases of that size persist, eventually we'll skip the search engine altogether and just use Wikipedia.
2. Rogers Wireless (the Canadian mobile phone company that overcharges me each month for mediocre service) illustrates why net neutrality is such an important discussion (the comments and links below the article offer differing views). Essentially, Rogers splits (adds content to) the Google search page in order to "communicate with its customers" (which in this case is a Rogers-Yahoo information banner).
Posted by gsiemens at December 11, 2007 9:33 PM | TrackBackI assume this is where you got those stats:
http://aixtal.blogspot.com/2007/11/search-google-yahoo-comparison.html
Nice post
Posted by: Doug at December 11, 2007 11:25 PMHi Doug - yes, that's it :). Sorry, forgot to include the link. Thanks for mentioning it. I've updated the post.
George
This type of "ad" by Roger's seems odd to me. Do you have a cap on how many times you can access pages or time limits on your service? I have tried to figure out what the purpose of the splits are, but can't. Can you explain a bit more what your system is?
Posted by: Virginia Yonkers at December 12, 2007 10:00 AMIn case you haven't come up with the reason for Wikipedia's popularity in results yourself, read this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/14/googlepedia_announced/
Posted by: Infidel at December 14, 2007 2:54 PM