Wikipedia.com vs Dictionary.com

December 9, 2009 in The Internet with 1 Comment

I was thinking this morning about how Dictionary.com and Wikipedia.com must have some of the longest of the long tails when it comes to search. Theoretically, they must rank highly for almost any and every word out there.

Out of curiosity, I looked at some traffic stats for the two:

Two things sort of surprised me. One, was how many more unique visitors Dictionary.com has had over Wikipedia.com, and two, what happened to Dictionary.com between August and September of 2009? Their traffic volume goes off of a cliff according to Compete.com. Their traffic levels are now steadily below Wikipedia.

Any ideas why that would be?

  • J.D.

    That’s really weird. If anything I would expect it to increase at that time, what with with school starting and everything.

    I have two guesses:

    Browser functionality. I don’t really use Firefox anymore, but 3.5 was released over the summer. Does it have a built-in, or improved spellcheck feature or new add on for a competing online dictionary?

    Opera 10 was released in early September, and although you can use the address field as a customizable search using abbreviations ( g+term for Google, w=term for wiki, etc) and it has dictionary.com is a default, I recently noticed that if you highlight a word+right click to find a definition, it uses Merriam Webster. I don’t know how new that is, though.

    or

    New smart phone platform/browser that uses the competition as a default.