A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results

Nicholas Vincent; Brent Hecht

doi:10.1145/3449078

A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results

Nicholas Vincent, Brent Hecht

Communication Studies

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

16 Scopus citations

Abstract

A growing body of work has highlighted the important role that Wikipedia's volunteer-created content plays in helping search engines achieve their core goal of addressing the information needs of hundreds of millions of people. In this paper, we report the results of an investigation into the incidence of Wikipedia links in search engine results pages (SERPs). Our results extend prior work by considering three U.S. search engines, simulating both mobile and desktop devices, and using a spatial analysis approach designed to study modern SERPs that are no longer just "ten blue links". We find that Wikipedia links are extremely common in important search contexts, appearing in 67-84% of desktop SERPs for common and trending queries, but less often for medical queries. Furthermore, we observe that Wikipedia links often appear in "Knowledge Panel"SERP elements and are in positions visible to users without scrolling, although Wikipedia appears less often and in less prominent positions on mobile devices. Our findings reinforce the complementary notions that (1) Wikipedia content and research has major impact outside of the Wikipedia domain and (2) powerful technologies like search engines are highly reliant on free content created by volunteers.

Original language	English (US)
Article number	3449078
Journal	Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Volume	5
Issue number	CSCW1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3449078
State	Published - Apr 22 2021

Keywords

data leverage
search engines
user-generated content
wikipedia

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
Human-Computer Interaction
Computer Networks and Communications

Access to Document

10.1145/3449078

Cite this

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title = "A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results",

abstract = "A growing body of work has highlighted the important role that Wikipedia's volunteer-created content plays in helping search engines achieve their core goal of addressing the information needs of hundreds of millions of people. In this paper, we report the results of an investigation into the incidence of Wikipedia links in search engine results pages (SERPs). Our results extend prior work by considering three U.S. search engines, simulating both mobile and desktop devices, and using a spatial analysis approach designed to study modern SERPs that are no longer just {"}ten blue links{"}. We find that Wikipedia links are extremely common in important search contexts, appearing in 67-84% of desktop SERPs for common and trending queries, but less often for medical queries. Furthermore, we observe that Wikipedia links often appear in {"}Knowledge Panel{"}SERP elements and are in positions visible to users without scrolling, although Wikipedia appears less often and in less prominent positions on mobile devices. Our findings reinforce the complementary notions that (1) Wikipedia content and research has major impact outside of the Wikipedia domain and (2) powerful technologies like search engines are highly reliant on free content created by volunteers. ",

keywords = "data leverage, search engines, user-generated content, wikipedia",

author = "Nicholas Vincent and Brent Hecht",

note = "Funding Information: This was work was funded by NSF grants 1815507 and 1707296. Authors email addresses: nickvincent@u.northwestern.edu, bhecht@northwestern.edu Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. Copyright {\textcopyright} ACM 2021 2573-0142/2021/04 - Art4 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3449078 Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 ACM.",

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PY - 2021/4/22

Y1 - 2021/4/22

N2 - A growing body of work has highlighted the important role that Wikipedia's volunteer-created content plays in helping search engines achieve their core goal of addressing the information needs of hundreds of millions of people. In this paper, we report the results of an investigation into the incidence of Wikipedia links in search engine results pages (SERPs). Our results extend prior work by considering three U.S. search engines, simulating both mobile and desktop devices, and using a spatial analysis approach designed to study modern SERPs that are no longer just "ten blue links". We find that Wikipedia links are extremely common in important search contexts, appearing in 67-84% of desktop SERPs for common and trending queries, but less often for medical queries. Furthermore, we observe that Wikipedia links often appear in "Knowledge Panel"SERP elements and are in positions visible to users without scrolling, although Wikipedia appears less often and in less prominent positions on mobile devices. Our findings reinforce the complementary notions that (1) Wikipedia content and research has major impact outside of the Wikipedia domain and (2) powerful technologies like search engines are highly reliant on free content created by volunteers.

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A Deeper Investigation of the Importance of Wikipedia Links to Search Engine Results

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Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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