I like Wikipedia; so much infact, that when searching for information in Google, I've got into the habit of prefixing 'wiki' in front of whatever term I'm looking for, because I'm pretty sure wikipedia will have an enlightening/well-written/interpretable entry; perhaps a basic entry, but that's sometimes the best place to start.

Anyway; just today I've noticed, perhaps I didn't need to type 'wiki mushroom' to be assured of a wikipedia page about mushrooms being high up in the ranking. Based on a random check, of what I deemed to be 32 completely unrelated terms across a number of 'fields of interest' 88% of those had a wikipedia entry on the first page, of those, 70% had the wikipedia link as the first entry. Here's my raw data:

These had a wiki page as the first link

deterministic
horse
cabbage
spider
dns
http
soul
dot product
quaternion
cigarette
television
window
chair
coffee
permanent marker
religion
smoothie
lamp
ceiling
internet

These had a wiki page as the second link

beer
truth
duvet

These had a wiki page somewhere relatively high on the first page

sanity
overture (knocked down because it seems to be a yahoo trademark)
forward
nutella
mirror

These didn't seem to have a link on the first page

math
google (worth a try =P)
coloured pencil
coloured crayon


-------

I think anyone would agree those are all quite unrelated, except maybe by association as I was typing (while sitting on a chair by a window, half watching television, smoking a cigarette and wishing I had a coffee; clearly).

I wonder, if Google's liking Wikipedia based on a wealth of ALL content, or a high relation to a single query.. Considering that the first links, in all cases other than those where a wiki link was first, were singular across the set of queries (i.e. there is no quantifiable 'second place' for a single domain meeting those queries); that's some pretty good going for Wikipedia, if you're interested in researching cabbages and quaternions.

uh, too much spare time there Matt?

just kidding

The search results are thrown at you based on popularity (also called as page rank) and there is no doubt Wikipedia has lots of it.

Lol.. wow.
This is interesting, but it took a lot of time I imagine. ;o)