• by Tim Daly , February 2, 2007

Everyone knows by now that user-generated content was the "in" thing of 2006 -- so much so that Time magazine named the user "Person of The Year." Nobody denies that user-generated Web sites have changed the face of the Web today, and will continue to do so in the future.

While Time looked at the trend of consumer acceptance of these new Internet vehicles, their impact has been both positive and negative. Some of their greatest influence lies in their effect on organic search results. No Web site epitomizes this better than Wikipedia. Try this: Go to your favorite search engine, be it Google, MSN, Yahoo, or Ask, and choose several one- or two-word searches at random. Once complete, I'll dare to guess that Wikipedia will have appeared on the first page of results for the majority of those searches.

I hope these results have startled you. Across every search engine today, Wikipedia stands tall as the authority on just about every subject matter underneath the sun. Whether you are in need of the definition of a word, a biography of a famous person, or you simply wish to determine the origin of something, Wikipedia stands out on search engines as a credible authority, regardless of the subject.

Wikipedia deserves kudos all around for an unbelievable business idea and for its rousing success in gaining search engine visibility. Its success at showing up so frequently on all fronts demonstrates the weakness that lies in search engines' algorithms that has perhaps rendered them obsolete. The shortcoming particularly lies in the overreaching importance given to link popularity. Wikipedia shows up in results so consistently due to the millions of internal and external links that it has generated across the Web. While search engine algorithms take this as a vote that the material on the page has substance, this is truly a "subjective" take, which is given "objective" weight in the algorithm. Obviously, Wikipedia cannot be the authority on everything. It simply shows up because it has tens of millions of links that suggest to computer algorithms that it is an expert, without further evaluation of this claim.

The question now lies in what this means to us as searchers. We can easily infer that if we keep getting non-relevant results, our interaction with organic results could plummet. This poses some interesting concerns:

Will search users begin interacting with and relying on sponsored listings for relevancy more frequently?

Will search engines run the risk of user abandonment due to irrelevant search engine query results?

Will the growth of general search engines be stunted, and will we subsequently see a shift to vertical search engines?

The next generation of search has arrived. Wikipedia has pioneered a new trend and will likely be boldly followed into the final frontier. Indeed, 2007 will be an interesting year as we watch how the first-tier search engines deal with this significant risk to their business models. The algorithms have been figured out -- and the emperor suddenly has no clothes.