Apparently Wikipedia is losing traffic that it receives organically from Google. Founder Jimmy Wales confirmed that traffic is down and that it has been going on for some time now. Most web users are used to seeing Wikipedia show up on the first page of most search queries, so why the traffic is going down is open to a couple theories.
Barry Schwartz wrote on SearchEngineLand.com:
I noticed this decline back in March, so this has been happening for a long time now.
Back in the day, Wikipedia dominated Google’s search results. It was likely the most visible site in the Google search results.
The question is, why is there a decline in Wikipedia’s traffic from Google? Some have theorized it might have to do with the Google Answer box, others say the algorithm has changed. It is hard to say for sure, but overall, it’s clear that Wikipedia is noticing a steady decline in traffic from Google.
Or it could just be that G’s search traffic is down overall. The move to mobile is happening really fast, and search behavior is changing fast too. G decided your site needed to be mobile friendly to get the same ranking in organic results as it used to get on desktop. But along with the shift to mobile, search behavior is very likely changing to. The impact on domain names, imo, is that short domains, and one word domains which are more mobile friendly, will keep becoming more valuable because of ease of use with a mobile audience.
I agree to a certain extent. If a person is keying in the item – yes.
What happens when they just talk to say what they want? That’s what my wife does. Does that open the world to longer names?
This is because Google provides a lot of contextual results, such as answers to questions e.g. “How old is Frank Schilling” in a snippet, pulling data from Wikipedia (most often.)