[bvaldivielso]

One very curious thing I ran into today: this morning I woke up and when I checked my phone, the (Spanish) Wikipedia page for Cleopatra was open on my browser. I didn't myself open that intentionally, but I thought I must have accidentally tapped on some links while I was asleep, and ended up there.

But now I see this website and it turns out that "Cleopatra" is consistently one of the most visited pages in the Spanish Wikipedia. Odd! I googled and it turns out that it's because it's one of the example queries in Google Assistant (source, in Spanish: https://www.elespanol.com/omicrono/software/20230118/cleopat... ). I must have tapped on it without realising. And like me, thousands of others, every day! Fascinating

[verelo]

Funny you mention that. I was also confused by this same experience! I was recently introduced to the theory that most of the internet is bot activity and very little legitimate user activity. I think from a pure ratio perspective that’s very true, and this list made me ask “this is what people want to know about?” I was hoping to see people researching higher level queries, most of this seems like film and tv or fairly basic concepts like “sex”.

[NineStarPoint]

Makes sense to me that only very popular and generic stuff makes the top of the list. Even if Wikipedia was used more for high level queries in aggregate, there’s so many possible things people could be looking into that it’s necessarily more spread out than whatever is popular this week.

[Retric]

Depends on what you mean by activity.

Bots don’t consume nearly as much bandwidth as people, they generally don’t care about assets like images or videos and the don’t download millions of copies of 100GB games. But they can make a very high volume of requests.