Searching for Wikipedia
- This article was originally published in the Wikimedia Techblog on June 7, 2021 CC BY-SA 4.0
- How people use Search to access Wikipedia is a common question by researchers. Until now, however, there has been little data available about this relationship. To help address these questions, the Wikimedia Foundation is releasing a new, faceted dataset on search engine traffic to Wikipedia so you can ask questions like "What is the most common search engine in my country?" or "Which search engine is most-used by Android users?"
It's no secret that search engines ferry a great deal of traffic to Wikipedia. With every major change in how a search engine presents its results,[a] questions arise about how the change might affect Wikipedia traffic. Historically, there has been scant data about how search engine traffic varied by platform and region.
We are taking a small step towards shedding greater light on the relationship between Search and Wikipedia by releasing a new, daily dataset of Wikipedia pageviews referred directly from search engines split by Wikipedia language, search engine, operating system, and web browser.
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