Today Microsoft Vista is available for purchase for the first time. In anticipation of the launch, last week the share of US Internet searches for ‘windows vista’ increased by 53% from the previous week (week ending 1/27/07 vs. week ending 1/20/07). The volume of searches for the much-anticipated new operating system surpassed interest in Microsoft’s most popular hardware products, ‘xbox 360′ and ‘zune.’ Searches for ‘microsoft office’ were up 49% in the same period, indicating that interest in the new Office software may also be driving interest in the new OS. Expect to see the share of searches for Vista-related terms increase substantially over the next few weeks, and interest in new computer purchases increase as the first PCs with Vista installed begin to ship in the coming months.

Hitwise Search Term Analysis shows that 58.63% of searches on ‘windows vista’ ended up at the Microsoft website, while 6.84% ended up at Wikipedia. This underscores the importance of Wikipedia entries, even for large corporations. In the context of this data, last week’s controversy over a Microsoft employee’s request to a blogger to correct the inaccuracies on a Wikipedia entry now becomes more salient. I expect that there will be more of these kinds of controversies in the future given the dominance of Wikipedia as an information source, and corporations and individuals’ interest in having themselves represented accurately. For the week ending 1/27/07, Wikipedia was the #3 site users went to when they left Google, accounting for 1.84% of Google’s downstream traffic. Hitwise captured more than 203,000 unique search terms that sent traffic to Wikipedia in the four weeks ending January 27, 2007.

While search term analysis is important in understanding where searchers go for information, it’s also important to look at the demographics of the sites to understand who is more likely to go to each data source. Hitwise demographics show a substantial difference between visitors to Wikipedia and visitors to the Microsoft site: Wikipedia users are much more likely be in the 18-24 age-group and visitors to the Microsoft site are much more likely to be over 55 .To me, this is a perfect example of the disconnect between older and younger Internet users. Older users tend to look for trusted sources of information (such as the company itself) while younger users trust that their peers using Wikipedia will have pulled together the most relevant information on one page for easy viewing. Why look at the flashy marketing-speak on the Windows site, when you can find just the specs you need on Wikipedia? This is how Wikipedia (and user generated content in general) is changing the game for corporations, and marketers should take note of not only of its magnitude, but also the tone and structure of the user generated content to influence their own campaign strategies.