An extraordinary day of breaking news on Thursday led to record-breaking traffic spikes as people searched online for information about the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and, especially, Michael Jackson. And just like their counterparts in traditional media, the news divisions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing responded with sometimes extraordinary measures to ensure they were giving searchers the most accurate and current news available.

Below, a look not only at the extreme traffic spikes that took place, but also an insider’s look at what happened as each search engine — and Wikipedia — grappled with the demands of a nearly unprecedented surge of interest in the day’s breaking news.

Google: “An all-hands-on-deck moment”

“Thursday was a pretty out-of-the-ordinary day.” That’s how spokesperson Gabriel Stricker describes the scene at Google’s headquarters while millions of people were online trying to find out what happened to Michael Jackson. Google has written about what it calls an “outpouring of searches” about Jackson. Stricker says Google saw a wide range of queries — like “michael jackson died” and “michael jackson hoax” — that peaked at about 3:00 pm PST.

The rush of traffic was so severe that Google initially thought it was under attack.

“That was an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Stricker says, “until we were able to determine that the original assessment was wrong, that it wasn’t an attack.” The massive spike in searches “tricked” Google News into showing an interstitial error page for about 25 minutes.

Google says the mistaken attack was its only hiccup yesterday, and that they saw no need to manually adjust results so that searchers got the right information. “The spike in traffic is an indication that we accomplished what we set out to do,” Stricker says. “People came to Google looking for an answer to a specific — and in this case, rather sad — question, and they got it quickly.”

Google hasn’t said yet how Thursday’s traffic compares to other important news events. Their blog post does say that Google “saw one of the largest mobile search spikes we’ve ever seen.” And Google Trends labeled Thursday’s searches for “michael jackson died” as “volcanic.”

Yahoo: “This demanded that we take our coverage to the next level”

Thursday was a record-breaking day for Yahoo. Their story, “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital,” received 800,000 clicks in 10 minutes, making it their highest-clicking story ever.

Yahoo also revealed that Yahoo News set an all-time record with 16.4 million visitors, beating the old record of 15.1 million set last election day. The four million visitors between 3-4 pm PDT set an hourly record.

Things were no less busy inside Yahoo headquarters. Richard Vega, Editor of Yahoo News, also described it as an all-hands-on-deck situation, going so far as to bring in staff on their days off. “After we saw initial reports that Michael Jackson had died, we immediately devoted all resources to the story and called staffers at home to help,” Vega says.

As a content destination and a news organization with writers and editorial staff, Yahoo took a more hands-on approach to packaging information for its users — even sending staff out to report live from Los Angeles. Says Vega: “We made sure to include the main stories and sidebars from AP and Time magazine. We had video clips from ABC News. We created slideshows. Since Michael Jackson had died in L.A., we sent out two editors to the UCLA Medical Center to interview and take photos of the fans who were gathering outside the hospital. In addition, one editor sent Twitter updates from the scene. This was a unique moment in history, which demanded that we take our coverage to the next level.”

Yahoo News recorded 175 million page views on Thursday, its fourth-highest total (after Inauguration Day, the day after the Inauguration, and Hurricane Ike). A blog post in Yahoo Music has received more than 21,500 comments as I write this. And Yahoo says Flickr has seen more than 4,000 Michael Jackson-related photo uploads in the past day. One poignant Flickr photo shows Times Square at a standstill as the offline world reacted the same way we did online.

Bing: “We rolled out a ‘news go big’ experience”

Like its competitors, the Bing search team was paying close attention to Thursday’s news as it unfolded, and doing its best to make sure searchers got the information they wanted. Jamil Valliani, a senior program manager for Bing, and Todd Schwartz, group product manager for Bing, said their effort included “the extended search team, including engineering, product management and marketing.”

They say Bing “definitely saw a spike” in traffic on Thursday, but they don’t have any data to share at the moment. “We get more feedback and see more engagement from consumers for bigger news stories, so we do have to spend more time than average reviewing this feedback and taking it into consideration.”

Some of the feedback for Bing’s Jackson-related search results wasn’t good. On Search Engine Journal, for example, Loren Baker pointed out that Bing’s search results led off with Michael Jackson photos, while news links were at the bottom of the search results page:

Valliani and Schwartz describe what happened: “In general, our rule is not to interfere with the normal algorithmic operation and to note any interesting or unexpected behaviors to be addressed in future upgrades of the product. The only exception to this is for major news events where we see unusual volume, and the results are clearly not being ranked in a relevant way. In these cases we can respond more quickly to how we perform the ranking. This was the case yesterday with Michael Jackson in particular, where we quickly rolled out what we call a ‘news go big’ experience to make sure we were providing appropriate coverage for this significant and sad event.”

Search experiences on other sites

The extraordinary online search for information about Thursday’s news wasn’t limited just to the major search engines. The Wikipedia page about Michael Jackson saw an enormous jump in pageviews on Thursday, and even more on Friday according to Grok.se, an unofficial Wikipedia traffic stats site.

Since Wikipedia pages are open to community editing, Wikipedia took unusual steps to deal with the situation as rumors spread Thursday afternoon.

“The Jackson page was temporarily ‘protected’ to prevent any editing as soon as the rumors started,’ according to Wikipedia administrator Jonathan Hochman. “There was a community discussion about how to handle that. The idea was to prevent the article from going back and forth, or being the subject of a hoax, until the story was verified.”

Twitter was a hotbed of Jackson-related searching and conversation. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the Los Angeles Times that there were nearly 5,000 Jackson-related tweets per minute on Thursday afternoon. “We saw an instant doubling of tweets per second the moment the story broke. This particular news about the passing of such a global icon is the biggest jump in tweets per second since the U.S. presidential election.”

Likewise, Facebook reported a tripling of the number of status updates in the aftermath of Jackson’s death.

The final word about this extraordinary day belongs to AOL, whose AIM messaging service was knocked offline for 40 minutes Thursday. Their statement begins like this: “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.”

Postscript: See Google Thinks Michael Jackson Died At Age 65 In 2007 for how Google’s currently listing the “wrong” Michael Jackson in response to searches for “michael jackson died.”

News.com reports that Wikia Search is giving up and closing up shop. Search Wikia launched an alpha release in January 2008, where Chris Sherman gave it a poor review.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia, told News.com “It was going to take at least an another year to two before it’s usable by the public, and we can’t afford that right now.” Due to the economy and the need to get to “profitability” right now, Wikia Search needs to shut down. Two full-time employees will be out of a job due to the decision. Wales said that Wikia Search only had 10,000 unique users a month over the past six months.

Is this the end of Wikia Search? Wales said no, he said “return to this again when the economy is good.”

Postscript: Here is the blog post from Jimmy Wales on the news.

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft has decided to discontinue their encyclopedia software, Encarta. Both the MSN Encarta reference Web sites as well as its Encarta software will be shut down. Microsoft said:

On October 31, 2009, MSN® Encarta® Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009. We understand that Encarta users may have questions regarding this announcement so we have prepared this list of questions and answers below. Please keep reading if you would like more information about these changes to Encarta.

Clearly, Wikipedia is the dominating online encyclopedia these days. Of course, that leaves concern in the library community for accuracy of encyclopedia content. I am not an expert in this area, so hopefully we will bring on someone to write a more detailed analysis of this change.

Like many people, I got a chuckle out of Jon Stewart’s recent send-up of Twitter on the Daily Show. If you haven’t seen it, the clip is below. I also thought it went nicely with the clip from Stephen Colbert on Wikipedia from back in 2006. So enjoy the double feature. Now if we can just get either of them to talk about Google.

Jon Stewart on Twitter:

And here’s Stephen Colbert on Wikipedia and “wikialilty.”

Yahoo has just announced that the Wikipedia SearchMonkey App is now turned on by default for all Yahoo search users. Wikipedia becomes the sixth app that all Yahoo searchers will see, joining LinkedIn, Yelp, Yahoo Local, Citysearch, and Zagat.

SearchMonkey adds enhanced content to the search results page. The Wikipedia app includes a snippet of text from the Wikipedia article summary, deep links to the first four sections of the article, and a photo if the article has one. Here’s a screenshot that Yahoo provided showing the Wikipedia app in action:

With the new app, Yahoo now joins Google and Live Search in a Wikipedia love triangle. (Quadrangle? Square?) The SEO industry has argued for years that Wikipedia ranks too high, too often in Google’s search results; almost two years ago, we wrote how Google sends Wikipedia tons of traffic. In May of last year, Live Search joined the fray by showing expanded descriptions under Wikipedia results. It’s good to be Wikipedia.

As web search engines have improved over the years, there’s been less attention paid to an “inconvenient truth” about the indexes of our favorite information finding tools—namely, that search engines still miss the lion’s share of information available on the web. This so-called “deep web” remains largely impenetrable to search engines for a variety of reasons, and for many types of queries that’s just fine. But if you’re a serious searcher, looking for the best information possible, you can’t afford to overlook this vast “hidden” store of information.

And that’s a challenge, because search tools that probe the deep web are for the most part either obscure or fee-based. That’s changing, thanks to a company formerly known as Infovell and now called DeepDyve. The eponymous DeepDyve.com rolls out today with an innovative approach to finding invisible web content that, despite limited coverage at the outset, impressed me with both what it finds and the tools it offers to make the searching experience even richer.

DeepDyve’s approach is like no other I’ve seen. Its chief scientists come from a background in genomics research, rather than computer science or linguistics. Genomics researchers strive to decode the information contained in DNA to understand the very building-blocks of life. Unlike search engineers who focus on text and keywords, genomics researchers look at a billion three letter “words” spelled out in the four letter alphabet of DNA. These words are combined in “sequences” that determine everything from hair color to whether we’re predisposed to a particular disease. To crack these codes requires massive amounts of data and the ability to see—and understand—hidden patterns of immense complexity.

DeepDyve takes a similar approach to understanding information on the web. Going far beyond basic keyword-based search, DeepDyve indexes every word in a document, but also computes the factorial combination of words and phrases in the document and uses some industrial strength statistical techniques to assess the “informational impact” of these combinations. In essence, this approach looks at the meaning of an entire document and uses that to compute relevance, rather than factors like snippets of text or anchor text in links pointing to documents.

It’s an interesting approach, and one that makes it easy to refine searches in a powerful way quickly and easily. “We think that search is going away from keywords toward where content is your query,” said William Park, DeepDyve’s CEO.

Today’s launch is relatively modest, with DeepDyve currently allowing searches in the areas of life sciences, patents and Wikipedia—about 500 million pages of deep web content (and arguably, Wikipedia isn’t really part of the deep web given its prominence in many Google, Microsoft and Yahoo search results, but that’s a minor quibble). Park says that the company is working hard to expand its coverage, adding physical sciences content in the areas of information technology, clean technology and energy, doubling DeepDyve’s index by year end.

The company also offers a premium version for $45 per month, with some nifty features like a “more like this” button that uses the full-text of a document as a query, with some pretty impressive results.

DeepDyve isn’t a threat to Google now or likely any time in the future. Instead, it’s a great tool for serious searchers wanting to do comprehensive research in the content areas that DeepDyve covers (it’s also, much like Powerset, a vastly more powerful way to search Wikipedia). DeepDyve also offers a genuinely different “second opinion” of the web if you’re wanting to look beyond the top results returned by Google and the other major search engines.

With its limited initial offering, DeepDyve has just scratched the surface of what’s available on the invisible web, albeit in a very useful way. However, truly cracking the invisible web problem still seems like a distant dream.

The article, “Nobody’s Safe in Cyberspace,” by Wikipedia editor and photographer David Shankbone, details a personal ordeal he experienced with an online stalker. It’s a horrible story that involves intimidation and threats of violence. But as Shankbone writes, there’s little recourse available to the one who is stalked and harassed online. And there are challenges in prosecuting people in the gray area of “internet speech.” It’s a problem that needs a thoughtful and measured response, not only from Wikipedia, but from online publishers and the legal community as well.

When writing about Powerset this week, I covered how its hopes to gain Wikipedia users was complicated by the fact that Wikipedia itself gets so many people from search, rather than direct navigation. New stats (PDF) from Nielsen Online reaffirm this — four of the five top referring sites to Wikipedia are search engines, with Google by far the leader.

Here’s the rundown on top referring sites that generate home users from the US, for April 2008:

To explain further, the chart above shows that 61 percent of people who were referred to Wikipedia in some way came from Google. And top sites that generate work users:

All that traffic Google sends to Wikipedia is one reason that many suspect Google would like to have its own Wikipedia alternative. Google Knol – Google’s Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages covers more about this, though that particular project has yet to happen.

After nearly two years in the making — and plenty of hype – Powerset has finally rolled out a "natural language" search engine. It’s not a Google killer. It’s barely a business model right now. But at least it’s something the world can finally play with, and under the hood, there’s lots of potential.

By the time you read this, the Powerset site should have changed into a tool that allows you search against material within Wikipedia. Why bother using Powerset rather than using Wikipedia’s own search tool or even Google set to look only within Wikipedia pages? The Powerset pitch is that you’ll get better results because Powerset’s technology has read and understood what every word within Wikipedia actually means.

An Understanding Engine, Not Natural Language Search

To understand that more, I beg that you forget you ever heard "natural language" being associated with Powerset. That’s not really describing what they do in comparison to regular search engines.

To explain, you have to understand that Google and the other major search engines are largely stupid. They don’t really understand the content on the pages that they "read." If they see the word "walk" in a sentence, they don’t know if walk is being used as a verb or a noun. In very general terms, they don’t even know that words are words. Words are more or less patterns to them — collections of letters — and when someone searches, they try to find the pages that have those patterns in them or in links to those pages.

That’s VERY simplified, OK? The major search engines DO have some smarts, some ability to know that walk is related to walking or that walk and run might be similar words. But this is largely done through statistical guessing, rather than comprehending what the individual words actually mean, especially in terms of their exact grammatical usage.

Powerset is different. It says that its technology reads and comprehends each word on a page. It looks at each sentence. It understand the words in each sentence and how they related to each other. It works out what that sentence really means, all the facts that are being presented. This means it knows what any page is really about.

In lieu of a better phrase, call it an "understanding engine." Maybe that’s not the right phrase, but natural language search isn’t it, either. Understanding engines at least highlights the uniqueness of Powerset — that’s because it actually understands what pages are about — it can extract facts from those pages plus comprehend how those facts, as well as those pages, relate to each other.

Wikipedia Discovery Tool

One of the chief uses for Powerset is employing it as a Wikipedia discovery or query refinement tool. To use the Powerset example they gave me during a briefing last week, consider a search for [henry viii]. What’s someone interested in in when they search on that topic, given Henry did a lot of things during his reign?

Over at Google, we get query refinement suggestions at the bottom of the page, like this:

At Yahoo

At Microsoft

Most of these are generated by looking at the relationships between those who have searched for one topic and then may have gone off and done another search. Yahoo has the most sophisticated of the pack (see Search Suggestions On Steroids: Yahoo Search Assist), but it still hasn’t actually "read" about Henry VIII and tried to group him into subtopics, in the way a human might.

That’s what Powerset tries. Here’s what you get in a search for Henry VIII:

Notice the tabs at the top, where it recognizes Henry VIII could refer to the person, the opera, the play, or even a television drama. OK, so not too amazing when you think about it. But look further to the "Factz" area. Here you can see that Powerset, after reading through Wikipedia, has figured out that Henry VIII "dissolved" things like monasteries or that he "granted" things like land. And yes, he "married" a few people.

There’s even more facts that can be found like this:

This is nice refinement. Running down the list, you can quickly scan the many facts that define Henry’s life. And from the list, with a click, you can drill in more about topics and jump right to particular pages within Wikipedia:

See how there’s a link to the Falmouth, Cornwall page? Powerset has seen that there’s something Henry VIII built mentioned on that page, Pendennis Castle. That’s not covered on the main Henry VIII page, but because Powerset has read both pages and understands what they are about, it can link the facts together.

Overkill For Now?

In short, the refinement is cool. What’s not to love about it? For one, it might be overkill. During the demo, Powerset made a big deal on how Powerset could build information from across various Wikipedia pages that isn’t written on any single one of them. For example, a search for [hulk hogan] brought this up:

See how those who Hulk Hogan has defeated are itemized? It’s nice — but do you really trust that all the defeats have been captured? I wouldn’t. I’d probably still go looking for an authoritative list that had been reviewed by a human. Moreover, I can get lists like that without great refinement. A search for hulk hogan victories on Google brings me to this nice page on About.com listing his world title victories.

In addition, while Powerset did a nice job of breaking down Henry VIII according to Wikipedia, Wikipedia’s human editors do a pretty nice job right in the opening paragraphs to the Henry VIII page:

Henry VIII (28 June 1491 – 28 January 1547) was King of England and Lord of Ireland, later King of Ireland and claimant to the Kingdom of France, from 21 April 1509 until his death. Henry was the second monarch of the House of Tudor, succeeding his father, Henry VII.

Henry VIII was a significant figure in the history of the English monarchy. Although in the first parts of his reign he energetically suppressed the Reformation of the Anglican Church, which had been building steam since John Wycliffe of the fourteenth century, he is more often known for his ecclesiastical struggles with Rome. These struggles ultimately led to him separating the Anglican Church from Roman authority, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and establishing the English monarch as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Although some claim he became a Protestant on his death-bed, he advocated Catholic ceremony and doctrine throughout his life; royal backing of the English Reformation was left to his heirs, Edward VI and Elizabeth I. Henry also oversaw the legal union of England and Wales (see Laws in Wales Acts 1535–1542). He is noted in popular culture for being married six times.

I suspect most people hitting Wikipedia are already going to find an opening paragraph like that, which does a pretty good job guiding them in refining their topics about Henry VIII and pointing them to facts.

That’s a problem for Powerset, which told me it hopes to  attract lots of those Wikipedia users to its own site, where they’ll be eventually shown ads alongside the content (ads aren’t present at launch).

Powerset was at pains to explain how popular Wikipedia is and what a well used resource it has become. Agreed — and plenty of those people wind up there because they’ve done searches at Google. About 70 percent of Wikipedia users come via search engines, according to Powerset itself. That’s a huge audience that is NOT going to magically be routed to Powerset instead. Yes, some know to go directly to Wikipedia. No doubt some of these users will hear of the new Powerset tool and go there. However, it will be a stunning achievement if these are more than a fraction of those who hit the main Wikipedia site.

Article Outlines

Powerset has another trick up its sleeve that might pull in the people. For any page you visit, there’s an "Article Outline" box that appears within it, like this:

It’s very slick. Select an item, and you’re jumped to the spot within the document related to it:

I think it’s self-evident that Powerset adds some nice value to Wikipedia. Indeed, everyone would probably be smart to go to it directly rather than Wikipedia itself. But as I’ve covered above, that’s not what I expect to happen.

Future In Site Search?

If Powerset fails to capture a wide audience, then what’s the way forward for it? One area is to provide better site-specific searching. Powerset’s technology can be applied to any set of documents, to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for within them. Site specific search allows those visiting a particular web site to look just within that site. That market, along with enterprise search (making intranets searchable) continues to grow. And the audience doing those types of search are likely more inclined to seek out refinement options and other exploratory tools than they are when performing general searches.

Powerset said this is a market they’re interested in, so perhaps we’ll see it grow in that area. But for those expecting it to produce Google-wealth, keep in mind that long-time and mature enterprise search player FAST sold for $1.2 billion earlier this year. Yes, that’s a huge amount of money, but it’s not the multibillions Yahoo was going to go for, and it’s much less than what Google’s valued at.

Speaking of Yahoo, it used to be the leading candidate in the past of who might acquire Powerset, especially given some close ties between the companies (Powerset has a number of former Yahoos on staff). Given Yahoo’s current troubles and unstable state, I wouldn’t expect much here.

Could a tie-up with a major player like Google or Microsoft happen? Sure. Aside from site search, the technology that allows machines to automatically comprehend what text documents are about ought to have other applications and be worth something. What those are and how much it is worth isn’t clear. Powerset’s been smart to snap up many licenses and patents around the technology that should make it attractive to a larger search player like Google or Microsoft to acquire. Within one of these organizations, I suspect more innovative things would come.

FYI, I wrote the above paragraph last Friday, before the rumors (see here on News.com and here on Techmeme) that Microsoft might want to buy it came out over the weekend. Actually, I started writing this article several months ago and in that, was covering how it might be an acquisition target. It’s a fairly obvious move to expect any of the majors to take a look, and when I talked to Powerset several months ago, I was given the impression that all the majors had taken a look.

Since then, of course, no one has acquired it — plus the company went through a management shake-up last year. It was already under fire for not getting a product out for so long. Add to these strikes as a potential Google killer the fact that it takes Powerset about a month to comprehend Wikipedia’s 2.5 million topic pages. In that time, many of those pages will have changed — thus needing to be reread again. Powerset’s impressive, but with the web having in excess of 20 BILLION constantly change pages, this is no overnight secret weapon that Microsoft might buy and employ to take the search lead.

Indeed, what Powerset says it has developed — along with patents locked up to protect it — is overkill for what’s needed today. It will be more useful probably five years from now, in ways we’re not even envisioning. For those players thinking long-term, which include both Google and Microsoft, sure — it might well make sense to buy.

By the way, the Powerset launch will no doubt inspire interest in another "natural language" search engine, Hakia. Someday I want to revisit Hakia and explain more about why I also dislike the term "natural language" being applied to it. In the meantime, you can read Vanessa Fox’s excellent article from last October on the service, Social Networking Through Search: Hakia Helps You Meet Others. And if you need a deflation of natural language hype, see The Google Challengers: 2008 Edition. In the section on Powerset, I summarize a long rant I did on the history and hype of natural language search.

For related discussion, see Techmeme.

Before investing time and effort in search rankings, and even before setting client expectations, it makes sense to gather whatever intelligence you can about the keywords you’d like to rank for. SEOs and webmasters have few reliable sources of information about the relationship between rankings and traffic. But Wikipedia’s traffic stats can help, offering some surprisingly detailed data.

Have you been searching for Jesus? On Google, Wikipedia ranks first for that search. How much is that first place ranking worth? According to Wikipedia’s public traffic stats, about 14k page views on a typical day, and 19.3k on Christmas. The redirect Jesus Christ, which points to the same page, gets about 25% as much traffic, and Christ adds another 10%.

Maybe you’re not the religious type. Have you been looking for sex? You are not alone, at least not online. The top ranked sex page gets 45k views per day. Love only gets 18k per day. Wikipedia readers prefer sex to love by a 5:2 ratio. Even on February 14th, St. Valentine’s Day, the power of love peaks at just 31k. Virginity, also listed first, gets relatively little action with 1.7k dailies.

While sex is a consistently popular topic, regardless of current events, news-related articles show much more traffic variation. The article on waterboarding, ranking first, ran between 2.8k and 74.6k visitors per day during February 2008.

A total of 465k people viewed the article that month. Since the United States presidential election season began, editors have been fighting over the article lead that says, “Waterboarding is a form of torture.” The phrase appears on the search engine results pages in a way that creates severe negative publicity for the Bush Administration. Several conservative editors have tried every which way to remove the incriminating phrase from Wikipedia. They finally became such nuisances that they were banned from editing.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain have wiki pages that rank third. Wikipedia blows away both Democratic Senators’ official web pages, but not the two campaign sites with their multi-million dollar budgets. Barack had 2.6 million monthlies to Hillary’s 858k. John McCain had a respectable 1.6 million views. George W. Bush was the wallflower with 106k views (but he is still more popular than virginity). When compiling these stats, I added variations together, such as Hillary Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, because redirects generate separate totals.

The top organic ranking for search engine optimization gets 4.3k page views per day. A Search Engine Land article that received 788 Diggs generated about 8k page views in about 24 hours. So the wiki article is equivalent to going popular on Digg every other day. I can assure you that writing one featured Wikipedia article is much easier than writing three articles per week that make the home page of Digg.

How about the article on Danny Sullivan (technologist)? Wikipedia ranks seventh, behind Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Danny’s personal blog, and the wiki article about race car driver Danny Sullivan. Seventh is not worth much: just 45 people per day view the article.

Wikipedia biographies of living people frequently appear in third position, right behind the subject’s own website. For instance, Matt Cutts’ article draws 75 to 128 visitors per day, Vanessa Fox’s 20 to 44, and Jason Calacanis’ 100 to 500, depending on how badly he behaves and whether his friends and foes are monkeying the article, as they often do. If you are thinking about creating an article to promote something, given the modest traffic volumes drawn by these rather high profile people, you might want to think of something else. Articles generate traffic when the search term already has volume. Creating a new page does not cause people to search for it.

Let’s look at one more example. Say a network of travel blogs writes a business plan predicting 2 million page views per month within a year. What does that mean, and how successful would the site have to be to hit those numbers? Clues are freely available. Wikipedia ranks second on Google for New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and London, and first for Tokyo, Moscow, Sydney, and Hong Kong. Those eight articles generate a total of 1.9 million page views per month. I personally would not put my name on that business plan.

Jonathan Hochman has two computer science degrees from Yale. He runs an Internet marketing consultancy and a web development shop.