While that may not surprise much of the SEO industry, it contradicts what some Google employees have previously said, as well as another recent study on Wikipedia’s search visibilty.

Last week, Conductor released updated data about Wikipedia’s search visibility, this time including Bing for comparison to its previous study that focused solely on Wikipedia’s Google visibility.

In the previous study, Wikipedia appeared on page one of Google 46 percent of the time, and on page two for 25 percent of the searches/keywords.

In its updated study, Wikipedia appeared on Bing’s page one for 31 percent of searches, and on page two only five percent of the time. The chart below shows Wikipedia’s visibility on Google (blue) and Bing (green) for all 2,000 combined keywords, as well as for the separate informational and transactional keywords.

(Note: The image above is a replacement provided by Conductor because the original image had a typo.)

At various conferences that I’ve attended, Google’s Matt Cutts has mentioned seeing earlier studies that had Bing showing Wikipedia more often in its search results than Google does. He echoed that sentiment in the comments of his Google+ post about Conductor’s earlier study. A recent Search Engine Watch study also suggested that Bing favors Wikipedia more than Google.

Why the discrepancies? It’s likely due to survey methodology, not to mention the rapidly changing search results landscape. (Search results can differ day-to-day, even hour-to-hour, so a study done one month is likely to differ from another study done a month later.)

In its studies, Conductor compared 2,000 informational and transactional keywords of varying word lengths. Navigational keywords were not included because Conductor found very low Wikipedia visibility for those types of keywords.

Bing Still Loves Wikipedia, Just Differently Than Google

Conductor’s recent study did reveal an interesting trend: Even though Wikipedia appears more often on Google’s page one, when Wikipedia does show up on Bing’s page one, it’s at the top of the results more often.

When Wikipedia is one page one, Conductor found it in the top three results 83 percent of the time on Bing, compared to 65 percent on Google.

Conductor also removed one-word queries from its study and found that, overall, Wikipedia appeared about 10 percent more often on Google’s page one than on Bing’s page one.

As I mentioned above, with search results changing so frequently, no study is likely to end the discussion on Wikipedia’s search visibility. But, if nothing else, all of this data related to search visibility — whether it’s Wikipedia or other major sites like Amazon — makes for good industry discussion.

For most of the past 18 months or so, Amazon has shown up on the first page of Google search results more often than Wikipedia and currently lands on page one about 40 percent of the time, compared to just over 30 percent for Wikipedia. That’s according to new research from SpyFu, which was published this week in response to our coverage of a Conductor study on Wikipedia’s Google visibility.

As you can see in the chart below, Amazon’s page one visibility on Google has been steadily increasing over the past five years, and sometime around the fall of 2010, Amazon shot past Wikipedia. Aside from two drops, Amazon has stayed higher.

SpyFu used its “SEO Recon database,” which the company says has 699 million Google search results pages (SERPs); for the purpose of this research, SpyFu looked at Google SERPs going back five years.

There’s a caveat, of course: SpyFu says its “keyword selections are more likely to be keywords that people advertise on; they are much more likely to transactional.” The blog post also says that these are likely to be high-volume, high-competition keywords.

SpyFu went beyond page one and looked at what sites have the most visibility in the top 50 results on Google. Wikipedia and Amazon are neck-and-neck there.

Despite the biases in its keyword set, SpyFu’s research mostly confirms the Conductor research on Wikipedia’s visibility level in Google’s search results. It also confirms a separate study from Slingshot SEO.

There’s a lot of other interesting data in the SpyFu research, including some research showing a huge spike in YouTube’s Top 50 Google visibility — a spike that appears to begin not long after Google launched its Panda update.

In fact, according to a new Conductor study, Wikipedia showed up on the first page of Google’s search results only 46 percent of the time in a study using 2,000 unique keywords.

Conductor used one thousand informational keywords (like “lyrics” and “bridal shower ideas”) and another thousand transactional keywords (like “headphones” and “where to find wall stencils”) in its study; as you’d expect, Wikipedia has much more visibility on informational searches than transactional — 60 percent for the former and only 34 percent for the latter. And overall, Wikipedia ranked one page one for 46 percent of the keywords.

Conductor’s study also found that Wikipedia doesn’t rank on page one or two for about 29 percent of the keywords it studied (see right column above).

Wikipedia: Still A Ranking Powerhouse

Even if those numbers are lower than you expected them to be, Wikipedia is still a ranking powerhouse. Conductor’s research shows that, when Wikipedia does show up on page one of Google’s search results, it’s in the top three spots 65 percent of the time (see right pie chart below).

Conductor’s study comes on the heels of a separate study last month suggesting that Wikipedia ranked highly on Google UK for 99 percent of all searches — a study that I suggested was flawed because it relied only one one-word searches. (And, in fact, Conductor’s study shows Wikipedia ranking on page one about 80 percent of the time for those keywords.)

In my article about the previous study, I suggested a different methodology — one that used a variety of keywords from single words (“headphones”) to lengthy phrases (“who built the statue of liberty”). Conductor explains that it used that methodology and, at the suggestion of Search Engine Land columnist Shari Thurow, divided the keywords into transactional and navigational. Conductor says it also examined a group of navigational keywords but Wikipedia wasn’t visible for those terms, so it excluded them from the full study.

Next, we need a similar study run on Bing’s search results so we can compare which search engine actually likes Wikipedia more. (hint, hint, Conductor…)

If you missed the link above, you can read more about the study on Conductor’s blog.

Postscript, March 23: For more on this topic, please see our article Move Over, Wikipedia: Amazon May Be The King Of Google Rankings.

Yikes, right?

Wikipedia — more specifically, Google’s apparent love of Wikipedia — has long been a sore spot in the SEO industry, so seeing a statistic like that is a big pile of salt in the wounds at this point.

But it’s really not a statistic to get worked up about because, in my opinion, the study itself was flawed.

Study Methodology

As Intelligent Position explains, the company used a couple random noun generators to come up with a list of 1,000 nouns — words like “ashtray” and “volcano,” “snowflake” and “melody.” It then did 1,000 unique searches on Google UK and charted if and where Wikipedia showed up in the first page of results.

The results? Wikipedia was on page one for 99 percent of those searches, was the top-ranked result for 56 percent and was in the first five results for 96 percent of those noun searches.

Over on eConsultancy today, Kevin Gibbons makes the point that this shouldn’t be too surprising because Wikipedia does a lot of things right where SEO is concerned: usually very rich/deep content, highly targeted web pages, strong domain authority, loads of inbound links and more.

I don’t argue at all with those points, but I’d add something that seems just as obvious to me: the study only used one-word nouns. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia — in large part, it’s a repository of information about nouns.

With all of that solid SEO in its favor, chances are great that searches for things like “tortoise,” “asphalt” and “liquid” are going to have Wikipedia very high in Google’s results. The Wikipedia page about tortoises is nothing short of amazing. Ditto the pages about asphalt and liquid.

A Suggestion For Different Methodology

Most search queries are longer than one word nouns. Chitika recently pegged queries at between 4.07 and 4.81 words on average, depending on the search engine. A couple months ago, Hitwise reported that 27 percent of searches that produced clicks were one word — leaving 73 percent of searches not represented in this study.

What I’d love to see someone do is this: Do a thousand searches (or more) that represent actual search engine behavior. Make 27 percent of those random searches be a single word (like “tortoise” or “liquid”); make 24 percent be two words (like “buy laptop” or “ankle pain”); make 19 percent be three words (like “u2 song lyrics” or “funny Valentine’s cards”), and so forth up to seven or eight words.

And then, using a variety of search terms that mimics actual search behavior, show how often Wikipedia appears in the first page of results. I’m pretty sure it’ll still be very high, but it won’t be 99 percent of the results.

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.”

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.

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.

Jon Stewart on Twitter:

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

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.

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.