According to some people, global warming may have catastrophic effects on the world around us. But in the meantime, it’s doing Wikipedia a lot of good – the site is receiving tons of traffic from that term.
Heather Hopkins serves as Hitwise UK’s vice president of research, and found that Wikipedia is “receiving one quarter of visits from searches for ‘global warming.’” The runners-up – Global Warming, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and The Royal Society – received just 16.96, 5.45, and 3.63 percent, respectively.
“Google, which accounts for 79% of UK searches, largely dictates the flow of UK web traffic,” notes Hopkins, and Wikipedia ranks first for “global warming” on Google’s Google+Search&meta=”>UK and Google+Search”>US sites. It also ranks first on Yahoo’s UK & Ireland site.
Wikipedia gives a poorer performance on Yahoo’s US site (third place), and only ranks tenth on Ask’s sites in both countries, but as Hitwise’s latest numbers show, not many UK users care about those engines.
Yet for UK users who care about global warming, Hopkins’s report does highlight a problem. “The increased interest in global warming raises interesting challenges for policy makers and those seeking to influence public opinion within the UK, as traffic is largely being directed to US websites,” she writes. As for how big a problem this is, you’ll have to decide for yourself – opinions about global warming vary widely, and it is, after all, a worldwide issue.
