It’s been a while now that most of the searches that I perform on Google give Wikipedia in the top five results. Since Google’s search results are infested with SEOed promotional pages, I have built the reflex of clicking on Wikipedia automatically. This is is mainly because I trust Wikipedia for the quality of its content. Of course, this is just another way of saying that Wikipedia is a useful website and that Google is not the solution to everything! But then I had to ask myself why I was using Google when I land on Wikipedia most of the time? I should be searching for stuff on Wikipedia and not Google.

Google, most will argue is good at crawling content an associating it with keywords. In other words, performing a search through Wikipedia will give less relevant results than performing the same search on Google with the option of limiting search scope to Wikipedia. My opinion is that this argument would be true if nobody used SEO techniques to push for promotional content on Google. Let me clarify my position by the following example.

Let’s say I’m searching for something and that The best page for that thing is a Wikipedia page. Let’s also assume that this thing is searchable with coveted keyword which is in heavy SEO attack. Therefore, hordes of SEO professionals are fighting for the keyword by creating tweaked content and tons of backlinks to their pages. Chances are that the Wikipedia page will not appear in the top results, which will make Google’s search algorithm’s edge less relevant and Wikipedia’s weaker search algorithm more efficient!

While this example might seem trivial to many, it has a very important meaning: social media can be a very good source of information if it produces information under a process that controls quality. Wikipedia has such a process and it’s because of this process that I have the reflex of looking at Wikipedia web pages every time they show up in search results. My conclusion is that all those who feel like Google is being taken over by a new kind of spam should turn to sites like Wikipedia if they are looking for accurate and less biased information. The corollary to this view is that everyone should get involved in the information production process. As famously said by Eric S. Raymond, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”