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Is it possible to sort Google Search results by popularity for a given search term? Also, is it possible to sort results by popularity for a specific website (e. g., Wikipedia)?

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Well, theoretically, they are already sorted by “popularity.” Is’t that what the search algorithm is all about? – Alex Aug 13 '12 at 17:04
Specifically, I am referring to view count, but I didn't explain that at first. Is it possible to sort pages by view count? – Anderson Green Aug 13 '12 at 21:55

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Google's search results are sorted by relevancy. The most relevant search results for the user are at the top. Google uses over 200 factors to determine the relevancy. Pure "popularity" might well be one of these factors, but there is no way to directly change the order of these results.

(Aside: But what is "popularity"? Is it the number of times web pages are visited (perhaps determined by analytics)? The number of times webpages are clicked on in the SERPs? The number of inbound links to that website? That last one is certainly one of the most important factors that Google uses - so in a sense "popularity" is already strongly linked to relevance.)

... for a specific website (e. g., Wikipedia)?

To search in a specific website, use the site: operator (no space after "site:"):

site:en.wikipedia.org search phrase goes here
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Is it possible to sort the results by view count (for each page?) That's what I would really like to know. – Anderson Green Aug 14 '12 at 1:29
"View count" - The number of times a particular web page has been viewed? Google can only know the number of times results have been clicked on in the SERPs, they can not possibly have information about how many times pages have been viewed outside of the Google bubble - if that is what you are after? But as mentioned in my answer, there is no way to change the order of the results in Google Web Search. Google's Custom Search does allow you to sort results - but that is a different animal. – w3d Aug 14 '12 at 8:51
What does "SERPs" refer to? – Anderson Green Aug 14 '12 at 11:43
Search engine results pages – w3d Aug 14 '12 at 13:31

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