Google & Other Search Engines Dominate Traffic Drivers To Wikipedia

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:

Site	Percent
Google www.google.com	61%
Yahoo Search search.yahoo.com	19%
Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org	11%
MSN Search search.msn.com	5%
AOL Search aolsearch.aol.com	3%

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:

Site	Percent
Google www.google.com	66%
Yahoo Search search.yahoo.com	16%
Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org	9%
MSN Search search.msn.com	6%
AOL Search aolsearch.aol.com	4%

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.