More than 1.6 billion users sent by Google

Jun 14, 2007 12:35 GMT  ·  By

The famous web-based encyclopedia Wikipedia receives visitors from numerous sources but it seems that the main source of traffic is the search giant Google. According to some recent statistics, Wikipedia has approximately 7 billion visitors per month and more than 233 million each day. From this impressive number, more than 1.6 billion visitors belong to Google as the Mountain View company sends no more than 55 million readers to Wikipedia every day. Google is the main source of traffic for the Internet encyclopedia with 23.7 percent of the total traffic recorded by Wikipedia.

The Sunnyvale company Yahoo offers only 4.8 million visitors each day and a total of 146 million every month, which means approximately 2 percent of the entire traffic. MSN, Live and AOL are placed on the last positions with less than 0.2 percent of visitors redirected to the official webpage of Wikipedia.

At this time, Google provides instant access to Wikipedia's articles using several hidden operators included in the search engine. However, Wikipedia's plans don't concern the Mountain View company because the encyclopedia's founders want to develop a revolutionary search engine to compete with the search giant. The search engine would be based on human control over the results displayed by the technologies and returned for certain keywords.

"Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: 'this page is good, this page sucks'. Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap," the Wikipedia founder said at that time according to ars technica.

Until Wikipedia manages to roll out the powerful search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo, the competition is still led by the Mountain View company and its famous technology.