How would you feel if half of your brand were controlled by one entity?
Is Wikipedia valuable? Did Google hijack half the value of the Wikipedia brand? Or did Google double the value of the Wikipedia brand?
I wouldn't be comfortable with a situation where half of my traffic came to me because of a gatekeeper who I didn't have any control over.
Thanks to the folks at Hitwise for the information.
By the way Google, thank you for driving a full one-third of my daily blog traffic, and about sixty percent of my RSS readers courtesy of Google Reader. Thank you for managing more than one hundred and fifty of my favorite RSS feeds. Thank you for being my primary search engine of preference. Nope, Google isn't controlling my life.
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Google's search engine is much better than Wikipedia's. Hence, even when I want a Wikipedia article, I tend to come through Google. I know that Wikipedia will usually be near the top, so I don't use any 'site:wikipedia.org' type filters either.
ReplyDeleteI know it would be hard to count how many people do the same thing, but I'm guessing it must be significant.
If Google were to suddenly 'switch off' Wikipedia, I would continue to want Wikipedia: either using the 'site search' on Google, or more likely, going to Yahoo/Live, or perhaps the Wikipedia search function itself will improve.
This is a contestible market in action. Yes, Google appears to have a lot of control over Wikipedia, but if it abuses that control, it will hurt itself by losing more users than I might gain through some strange business plan.
Dan, thanks for the comments. Hopefully, you're right, any misstep by Google hurts Google more than they companies they largely control.
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