Fast Company iPad edition promotion

The Tangled Relationship Between Jimbo Wales and Google

BY Fast Company Staff | April 1, 2007

* Related Stories

  • Why Is This Man Smiling?
    Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, slayer of Britannica, has a new giant in his sights: Google. And he thinks he has got a better way to search. Is he delusional--or inspired?
  • The Search Market
    Google dominates in visitors, the number of searches, and, most important, money.
  • A Highly Subjective History of Search
    Since its launch, Google has been the search destination for the digerati. But where the cool kids search has been historically fickle. Is volatility about to make a comeback?

Wikipedia

Wikipedia, for its part, gets around one-third of its traffic from referrals from Google's search engine.

Google

Google gets a lot of traffic from people interested in Wikipedia.

Google's top searches for 2006
  1. Bebo
  2. MySpace
  3. World Cup
  4. Metacafe
  5. Radioblog
  6. Wikipedia
  7. Video
  8. Rebelde
  9. Mininova
  10. Wiki

Meanwhile, Wikia relies on text ads generated by Google.

Wikia

Although Wikipedia and Wikia are separate ventures, they both share Wales as their founder, and inevitably, the kind of person who volunteers for Wikipedia will volunteer for Wikia.

From Issue 114 | April 2007