Undoubtedly, Google´s algorithm favors content featured at the biggest multilingual encyclopedia on the Internet: Wikipedia.

For some time now, I´ve noticed an ever-growing amount of Wikipedia.org links displayed on the first page of Google´s organic results. It´s worth mentioning that Wikipedia ranks for keywords and phrases, that would normally take most highly skilled SEO´s a goodly amount of time, resources and effort to promote. We´re talking BIG TIME, highly competitive phrases -- with over 400 million pages indexed in most cases.

ie, do a search for...

- dvds (wiki result, 1st out of 238,000,000 pages)
- electronics (wiki result, 1st out of 406,000,000 pages)
- marketing (wiki result, 1st out of 502,000,000 pages)
- internet (wiki result, 1st out of 1,290,000,000 pages)
- cigarettes (wiki result, 1st out of 26,000,000 pages)
- war (wiki result, 1st out of 554,000,000 pages)
- life (wiki result, 1st out of 1,080,000,000 pages)
- sex (wiki result, 2nd out of 395,000,000 pages)
- music (wiki result, 2nd out of 982,000,000 pages)
- government (wiki result, 2nd out of 476,000,000 pages)
- food (wiki result, 2nd out of 595,000,000 pages)
- medicine (wiki result, 2nd out of 300,000,000 pages)
- history (wiki result, 4th out of 943,000,000 pages)

It’s worth pointing out that Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, unveiled details today of his company's intention to compete with Google.com.

The new Wikipedia site, due to launch by the end of 2007, combines human-assisted editing with computer-controlled searches.

'If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers,' said Wales at a software developer conference in Oregon.

Will Google continue to show Wiki love, once the latter has officially ventured into the search business? We certainly hope not. Personally, I’m looking forward to searching a cleaner version of Google.com, as apposed to the now cluttered and overly saturated wiki results.