We all know by now that Google has committed itself to being the world’s “greatest knowledge engine.”  With so many search queries being Named Entities, Google realized that it must provide reasonable amounts of knowledge with every query.  This is why more and more “named entities” have what is called a Knowledge Graph on the right hand side of their search results.  The information there is usually provided by Wikipedia. This is now yesterday’s news.  What is also yesterday’s news is that Wikipedia ranks very high for any short tailed Named Entity.

But what about concept queries?  Is Google interested in ranking Wikipedia for let’s say for ‘Big Data’?

As you can see Wikipedia is #1 for Big Data.

A recent research paper by Google details how the Search Engine might rank Wikipedia results for queries other than Named Entities. Below is the Abstract:

We present a resource for automatically associating strings of text with English Wikipedia concepts. Our machinery is bi-directional,
in the sense that it uses the same fundamental probabilistic methods to map strings to empirical distributions over Wikipedia articles
as it does to map article URLs to distributions over short, language-independent strings of natural language text. For maximal interoperability, we release our resource as a set of flat line-based text files, lexicographically sorted and encoded with UTF-8. These files
capture joint probability distributions underlying concepts (we use the terms article, concept and Wikipedia URL interchangeably) and
associated snippets of text, as well as other features that can come in handy when working with Wikipedia articles and related information.

-A Cross-Lingual Dictionary for English Wikipedia Concepts, by Valentin I. Spitkovsky, Angel X. Chang

Every particular industry can potentially have a Wikipedia result in the top 20.  Using Wikipedia to drive traffic to a site may sound far fetched, but why play for the top spot if Google has already provided it for you? Just leap frog off of that ‘Knowledge Result ‘ and watch you traffic soar.

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1. Knowledge Base: A New Information Metric in Search Now that Google has acknowledged it is moving from a...