The numerous sites going dark on Wednesday to protest the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act and its sister legislation in the Senate, the Protect I.P. Act, has caused legislators to rethink their positions. These bills, in their current incarnations, are now very unlikely to pass, writes the New York Times.

The Times also took note that Wednesday’s blackout was the first time so many Websites banded together for a political action. Impact on Search Given the unprecedented coordination, a number of researchers monitored what exactly happened—or not—on the Internet yesterday.

Wikipedia-less College Students

Some gaps were obvious:  Some 20.2 million college students had to use Google caches of Wikipedia instead of the live version for their essays, said Covario, which analyzed the popular sites that were blacked out in protest: Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist and WordPress.

Also, 18.1 million minutes did not get spent on Reddit. Craigslist lost up to $825,000 in revenue (at $25 per post for 33,000 new job postings a day).

"For each of these top websites, the geographic distribution skewed highly to the West Coast and secondarily to the East Coast with the Midwest seeming to be least affected," it also said.

Online Rubber Necking

Zscaler noted an increase in traffic at Wikipedia on Wednesday—by people curious about the blackout and wanting to reach more about the bills. There was a noticeable percentage increase in the unique visits to Wikipedia from Tuesday, it said.

"However, these additional visitors are not incurring that much more bandwidth for Wikipedia–we have noticed only a slight percentage increase in Wikipedia web transactions today [Wednesday]. This suggests that more people are flocking to Wikipedia today, but just to see the protest page and some details on SOPA. This behavior could be described as 'online rubber necking'."