Much has been written about the long tail of search, a phrase brought to the collective consciousness by Chris Anderson of Wired. The term refers to the belief that there's more to be gained by going after niche markets via search and other means rather than trying to go after the more popular, but more competitive, general interests of web users.
But what about the short head? Who benefits from common searches like "football" and "thanksgiving"? It turns out that Wikipedia is emerging as the king of the short head. I noticed this partly from my own searches, but also from taking a quick peek at where Wikipedia shows up for the most common searches according to the October 2006 Google Zeitgeist listings. I was not surprised to see that Wikipedia shows up in the top Google listings for many of the most common searches.
For example, Wikipedia shows up #1 for "thanksgiving", #3 for "old navy", #3 for "football", #4 for "halloween", and #5 for "daylight savings time". These are, for the most part unrelated terms and in some cases quite competitive, yet Wikipedia is there holding on to a top spot. And as with just about everything on Wikipedia, the articles are written by volunteers who aren't even trying to have top-ranking pages, but are rather just contributing because they enjoy the experience.
The downside of all of this is that as Wikipedia participation expands; it's trust and authority increases; and it's collection of articles grows, it will become more and more difficult to outrank them. And while their presence in search engines seems to be largely restricted to the short head of search, I can see them one day encroaching on a large portion of the long tail too.
Nothing like a little competition to keep things interesting, right!?
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