As the author of the Wikipedia nofollow WordPress plugin, I’m always on the lookout for stories about how Google and Wikipedia are getting on with each other. Recently I spotted this story on The Register about Encyclopedia Britannica complaining that Google ranks Wikipedia too highly. Naturally EB would complain about such a thing, but what particularly caught my eye was mention of an experiment Nick Carr, a member of the Brittanica’s board of editorial advisors, performed, looking up ten diverse topics in Google. Then, all 10 appeared on the first page of Google with two number ones. The current situation is all are now top of the pile, so I wondered what happens if I try the equivalent phrases in Japanese. I translated the terms by accessing the English Wikipedia then switching to Japanese, and using the article title. Also, since Google and Yahoo! battle it out for dominance in Japan, I used both engines, with the following results:
| Term | Google Rank | Japanese | Google Japan Rank | Yahoo! Japan Rank |
| World War II | 1 | 第二次世界大戦 | 1 | 1 |
| Israel | 1 | イスラエル | 1 | 2 |
| George Washington | 1 | ジョージ ワシントン | 1 | 1 |
| Genome | 1 | ゲノム| 1 | 2 |
| Agriculture | 1 | è¾²æ¥ | 1 | 6 |
| Herman Melville | 1 | ãƒãƒ¼ãƒžãƒ³ メルヴィル | 1 | 1 |
| Internet | 1 | インターãƒãƒƒãƒˆ | 1 | 17 |
| Magna Carta | 1 | マグナ カルタ | 1 | 1 |
| Evolution | 1 | 進化 | 1 | 1 |
| Epilepsy | 1 | ã¦ã‚“ã‹ã‚“ | 1 | 1 |
There are five non-first places in Yahoo!,something one can take as a good or a bad sign. For agriculture, ahead of Wikipedia in 4th place was Yahoo!’s own encyclopedia, an electronic version of a popular paper dictionary. The internet only making 17th place in Japanese is another curious outcome.
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Wikipedia usage rates in Japan » 世論 What Japan Thinks · January 27, 2009 at 23:51
[…] a sort-of follow-up on my earlier post on Wikipedia’s dominance of Japanese search engines, here’s a survey from Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com into […]