There’s been some talk lately about Wikipedia’s dominance when it comes to Google search results. Some studies have found Wikipedia to appear on page one of Google results as often as 80% of the time. Wikipedia is a great non-profit organization, so we’re not saying that’s a bad thing. But what makes them so good at ranking highly on Google?

For starters, Wikipedia articles are set up in the perfect fashion for crawling search engines. They’re well organized by topic and include clear headings for all of the content within the entry. It also doesn’t hurt that many online users trust Wikipedia and purposely seek out its articles on various topics. For single word search queries on Google, no site appears more often on page one than Wikipedia, but does it always do so well?

The longer or more specific a search query is, the less likely that Wikipedia will be a top result. When searching for “golden retrievers,” Wikipedia is the first result that comes up. When searching for “golden retrievers for sale,” it’s nowhere to be found. This speaks to a huge void in the community-driven environment of the web.