Google the first thing that comes to mind, and chances are a Wikipedia link will appear on the first page of search results. Thus, Wikipedia has grown into one of the most popular websites in the world.

If Vox were looking for a model to emulate, it could have done worse.

Former Washington Post star Ezra Klein's explanatory journalism website launched Sunday night and serves as the namesake for Vox Media, which also publishes The Verge, Eater and SB Nation. The site's content has quickly been likened to a newsier Wikipedia, with navigation that can be clicked through to gain an understanding about news and current events.

I’d say @voxdotcom cards are handy but not exactly revelatory. We already have Wikipedia, after all. And hyperlinks: http://t.co/wY5LdYkjEx

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) April 7, 2014

Some people came to its defense, though.

yeah i can't think of how detailed, updated backgrounders on complex news stories written by expert reporters would be at all useful

— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) April 7, 2014

The site's welcome post, penned by Klein, fellow former Washington Post journalist Melissa Bell and former Slate writer Matt Yglesias, highlights that the site is meant to serve as a source for information, with an ultimate goal of providing context to the news.

The site's launch is "the beginning of our effort to build the vast repository of information that will make it possible for us to explain the news in real time," according to the post.

Comparisons to Wikipedia's content might be a bit overly simplistic, but are flattering when it comes to SEO and web traffic.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia and several other sites, now attracts roughly 500 million visitors per month with billions of page views. Google's search alone generates 56% of that traffic, according to comScore.

Media websites are particularly beholden two areas of the Internet: social media and search. Wikipedia may have cornered the market on search, but BuzzFeed has found success corralling traffic from social media. BuzzFeed generates about 75% of its traffic through social referrals, according to Reuters. Vox sports the now-standard social media share buttons, but the evergreen nature of its content is more suited to long tail searches.

Vox would not be the first site to attempt to corner the market on search engine trends. An exhaustive article in SF Weekly detailed how Bleacher Report, a popular sports website, generated great traffic by determining people's search habits in order to optimize its content accordingly.

Some companies have even tried to game the system. Rap Genius ended up in hot water with Google for some questionable linking practices.

Those cards

The singular innovation of Vox, at least for now, is its cards.

 They’re inspired by the highlighters and index cards that some of us used in school to remember important information. You’ll find them attached to articles, where they add crucial context; behind highlighted words, where they allow us to offer deeper explanations of key concepts; and in their stacks, where they combine into detailed — and continuously updated — guides to ongoing news stories.

A recent New York Times article lauded Vox's intersection of journalism and technology as an important element of its efforts. Highlighters and index cards may not sound like the most technologically advanced idea, but permanent pages — the cards — that are routinely updated will provide an important foothold for the site.

As Bell told the Times, each card will be "like a wiki page written by one person with a little attitude."

Obamacare and the missing Malaysian airliner are two of the topics covered by the site's inaugural series of cards. A quick Google Trends inquiry highlights just how popular these topics have become on its search engine.

The searches for Obamacare:

The searches for MH370:

It will take time to rise through the ranks of search engines, but the permanence of the cards is an important advantage.

Links are an important part of search engines. As Vox builds up its archives and link to its cards (and hopes that others do as well), those pages will rise up the search rankings.

It will be difficult to corner the market on an established topic like Obamacare, which has already generated thousands of articles. Newer stories may prove easier. If Vox's card on the Malaysian airliner had existed since the plane first went missing a month ago, it could have already been referenced many times and risen up the ranks.

The upside of turning up high on a search ranking for a key term like Obamacare is a flood of traffic. The downside is that SEO has become a very competitive field in which the winners take the bulk of the traffic. Those who can't make it to the first page of search results see rapidly diminished returns. The first result in a search engine gets 33% of the traffic, and the drop-off after that is steep.

Moving targets

"We’ll always be a work in progress," Vox concludes in its welcome post. For a site that seems reliant on traffic driven by people searching for a wide range of information, it will need to live up to that adage.

Search is not a stagnant element, and not even Wikipedia is immune to the ever-changing nature of the Internet. The site endured a traffic dip in 2013 as Google's Knowledge Graph started to infringe on its turf.

For Vox's search engine play to succeed, it will need to maintain a certain malleability. Google, not to mention other search engines, changes its search algorithm almost daily.

This leaves businesses that rely on Google in a precarious position, digital media entrepreneur Jason Calacanis noted at a recent tech conference: “If [Google is] taking the traffic away from Wikipedia, which is a non-profit, how do you think they’re gonna treat everyone else?”

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