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Google Donating Bandwidth and Servers to Wikipedia

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the yes-have-some dept.

Armstr0ng writes "According to Dirson's blog, Google plans to help Wikipedia by donating bandwidth and servers to handle part of their increasing load. In fact, there's an official page of Google's proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects."

4 of 451 comments (clear)

  1. Another jab at MSN? by sangreal66 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seems like Google hasn't taken to kindly to Microsoft's recent launch of the new MSN Search. Last week they moved Google Local to the front page in an apparent effort to meet Microsoft's localization feature. This move looks to me like an attempt at meeting Microsoft's Encarta integration.

  2. Re:One idea as to why Google is doing this.... by MOMOCROME · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google needs to solve the problem of people searching a term to get a rough idea of the meaning. They've got it covered for definitions, but more advanced concepts are still wanting.

    As it is, say you are interested about what happened in 1033 AD. If you search for "1033" you get a range of pages that have anything to do with 1033 AD, instead you get info abobut RFC 1033, port 1033, california legislation s.1033, and so on. If you search for "1033 AD" you likewise get a wide range of incidental and nearly useless trivia about 1033 AD, with very little in the way of comprehensive overview.

    Wikipedia has an entire page on the events of every year starting at around 900 AD, iirc. It should be the first hit for searches like that. Google is looking for a means to justify making it so, without complaint from the wikioids and without complaint from the people stressing over page rank for their site. Expect a section with an automatic overview of the wikipedia entry, similar to how they are placing image search results at the top of some searches now, or like they do with news.

    The deal here is that google wants to retain the lead spot for quick reference needs. Wikipedia serves that purpose very well, but I'd say most people don't know to check it out.

  3. Re:For a small price by Carnildo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wikipedia would also be the perfect place to demonstrate their search capability and test new search algorithms: it's got good internal linkage, contributers are well-behaved, it's very high-traffic, and it's got a large document base to work from.

    --
    "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
  4. Re:It's awesome... by kryogen1x · · Score: 5, Insightful
    ...and google disagrees with some content on it (read: investors aren't happy with content), there's a possibility of censorship or removal of content?

    The content doesn't have to be hosted on Google's servers for Google to edit the content. Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone.