Wikipedia eats Google
socialtext.com
Google is becoming increasingly prone to Wikipedia. This is because Google's PageRanktm algorithm, the method by which it ranks search pages, inheritantly succombs to the basic structure and social structure of wikis.
The PageRank algorithm is most famously characterized as valuing links that are highly referred to by other people. It seems that is only part of the story. The PageRank algorithm values links to yourself more. That is, a website that has many pages and is densely inter-woven with links becomes a sort of PageRank machine. True, without other websites conferring a little bit of their PageRank onto it, that website will not have a high PageRank, but given enough of a small number of external links from mediocre websites pointing to your very large, densely interwoven website, your website will shoot up through the listings.
As Wikipedia is the largest and most popular wiki around on both dimensions, it stands to reason that its PageRank is going to be pretty high. Not only are there millions of links to Wikipedia--most of them from very small and relatively unknown locations on the Internet, each conferring a little tiny bit of PageRank, but Wikipedia's hyper-encyclopedic style lends itself to densely interwoven pages. Noting that Wikipedia has nearly 1 million pages, Wikipedia is a PageRank monster.
I would like to demonstrate directly why I make this claim. This search returns the entire set of indexed pages on Google. Naturally, the number 1 position is the page with the highest PageRank on the entire Web.
Wikipedia is #1 out of 10 billion search results.
( google.com*+* )
It gets better, of course. Again because Wikipedia is the Internet's encyclopedia, many of the articles have included resources from the Google searches on that topic. Over time, Wikipedia has been slowly eating the entire Web's knowledge base until it becomes itself a faster, better, and--most critically--unspammed reference matter of what are the relevant and valuable resources. And unlike mere link directories, it doesn't simply list links, it tells a story about them.
There is an important lesson hiding in the subtext here. On the Network, The power of people will kick the backside out of algorithms. While computer sciencey solutions are almost always gameable, communities are equally almost always resilient, adaptive, and intelligent.
The future of knowledge management is not data mining nor document object repositories; that is the science of dead information. The future is telling stories to each other, building knowledge together through those stories, and reshaping ourselves through those actions. That's the vivid, active, powerful future of the Wiki Way. |
