Thursday, September 03, 2009

Google and Wikipedia revisited

Given that one response to my post on Fungi in Wikipedia was to say that fungi are also charismatic, so maybe I should try [insert unsexy taxon name here]. So, I've now looked at all the species I extracted from Wikipedia (nearly 72,000), ran the Google searches, and here are the results:

SiteHow many times is it the top hit?
en.wikipedia.org42515
www.birdlife.org2125
commons.wikimedia.org1522
plants.usda.gov1496
species.wikimedia.org1487
animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu1419
amphibiaweb.org851
www.calflora.org770
www.fishbase.org727
ibc.lynxeds.com699
davesgarden.com659
www.arkive.org510
ukmoths.org.uk414
zipcodezoo.com368
www.itis.gov304
calphotos.berkeley.edu294
www.floridata.com234
www.planetcatfish.com234
www.eol.org226
www.arthurgrosset.com213


The table lists the top twenty sites, based on the number of times each site occupies the number one place in the Google search results. Surprise, surprise, Wikipedia wins hands down.

What is interesting is that the other top-ranking sites tend to be taxon-specific, such as FishBase, Amphibia Web, and USDA Plants. To me this suggests that the argument that Wikipedia's dominance of the search results is because it focusses on charismatic taxa doesn't hold. In fact, the truly charismatic taxa are likely to have their own, richly informative webs sites that will often beat Wikipedia in the search rankings. If your taxon is not charismatic, then it's a different story. This suggests one of two strategies for making taxon web sites that people will find. Either go for the niche market, and make a rich site for a set of taxa that you (and ideally some others) like, or add content to Wikipedia. Sites that span across all taxa will always come up against Wikipedia's dominance in the search rankings. So, it's a choice of being a specialist, or trying to compete with an über-generalist.