Can Wikipedia’s traffic ever be independent of search engines? Experience alone will tell you that they rely greatly on search engine results for their heavy traffic, with Wikipedia pages often popping up in first page if not the first results of search engine windows, especially in Google.

New statistics from a recent Nielsen Online survey reaffirms this. Here are some results a rundown on top referring sites that generate home users from the US, for April 2008:

Google – 61%

Yahoo Search – 19%

Wikipedia – 11%

MSN Search – 5%

AOL Search – 3%

According to Search Engine Land, the results above prove that 61% of browsers who were referred to Wikipedia in some way came from Google. Here are the top sites that generate work users:

Google - 66%

Yahoo Search – 16%

Wikipedia – 9%

MSN Search – 6%

AOL Search – 4%

It makes one wonder how the search engine giant is handling such findings and how, more importantly, they can capitalize on it? All that traffic Google sends to Wikipedia is one reason that many suspect Google would like to have its own Wikipedia alternative, wrote Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land. Google Knol – Google’s Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages covers more about this, though that particular project has yet to happen.