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Yahoo! Search Providing Support to Wikipedia
Jamesday writes "Yahoo! Search will also be providing support for Wikipedia. Discussions, started at the same time as the aforementioned Google announcement, have been ongoing with both Yahoo! and Google but only the Google news leaked. It's now more clear why Wikipedia said there was no need to worry about undue influence from any single sponsor."
While Yahoo! and Google may be competitors, the two of them often do collaborate, with Yahoo! even using Google to do their searches. I don't know if I'm entirely comfortable with a caveat about "not worrying about undue influence from any one vendor" when the other 'opposing' influence is in the game for the same reason and has a history of working with is 'competitor'.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
But Google itself is a public corporation. It's its own animal in that regard, with attorneys and bean-counters making the "nice guys" who run the place beholden to the mythical shareholders, who demand results and accountability. Maybe the nice guys do not want to create a situation that locks out the Microsoft crawlers. The needs of the corporate entity, though, demand it. Maybe the nice guys don't want to take over Wikipedia and clean it up, change the way it works--ruin it--as per the lawyers' demands. The corporation demands it. Those nice guys are not working for themselves any more. We always have to remember that. They are now guests.
It certainly seems like Yahoo! is turning back around, hot on Google's heals. With Yahoo 360, Flickr, and their developer tools, it seems like they are becoming relevant (again.)
Wikipedia is great, IMHO. The main thing holding back really is hardware. It often runs too slowly and in particular using wikipedia's built-in search often returns a "server is overloaded" response. (I guess that's why I always use Google to search for the correct wikipedia page.)
That's why I think these deals are a good thing. If companies are willing to donate bandwidth and server storage to wikipedia, that will help the project quite a bit. Of course, we are all concerned about wikipedia being corrupted by companies, and something awful happening to the whole project. I, for one, think wikimedia is smart enough and dedicated enough to avoid this. And even if they arn't, let's all remember that the whole *point* of wikimedia releasing everything under commons licensing is that *no one* (not even wikimedia) can lock the content away or commercialize it. If wikimedia starts becoming evil, someone can (and will) fork the project and re-release the entire thing.
The way that Wikipedia is set up, with the constant editing of its pages, I'm not concerned about in the least about what influence Google or Yahoo! might have. Wikipedia started without them, and there is no reason why, if the worse case scenarios happen, that another collaborative encyclopedia cannot be started. It simply too good of an idea to succumb that easily.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
"The shortcuts will show contextually relevant abstracts of Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/ articles in response to user queries."
Meaning that people will search for something, be present with an encyclopedia (which isn't) by the search engine, then take what it says to be correct as if it had been fact-checked. There are just too many errors in Wikipedia for it be turning up when students search for things on the internet.
They ARE working together! See!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
A decibel - a RELATIONSHIP between two values of POWER http://arts.ucsc.edu/EMS/Music/tech_background/TE-
Well, it was about time... doesn't surprise me either. The philosophy of the big corp is, if you can take advantage from the little, then, help them. If it will give you no money, don't help them. (even if it for a good cause, which is free information -- education). I feel unconfortable, I know Wikipedia would make good use of new hardware and resources, but, geez, is it always have to be this way?
WARNING: DO NOT LET DR. MARIO TOUCH YOUR GENITALS. HE IS NOT A REAL DOCTOR!
Wikimedia Foundation and MSN Search announced today that they have reached an agreement by which MSN will provide a host of monkeys to Wikimedia. MSN will dedicate a significant number of primates in one of its Redmond facilities for writing Wikimedia's free content. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, says that this generous donation will be of particular benefit to the vibrant and growing community of Wikipedia-heads.
http://www.eclipse-plugins.info/eclipse/plugin_de
Wikipedia will not turn into the object of spammers and so.
I see hard times coming.
errera hunamum ets
"Meaning that people will search for something, be present with an encyclopedia (which isn't) by the search engine, then take what it says to be correct as if it had been fact-checked. There are just too many errors in Wikipedia for it be turning up when students search for things on the internet."
But, but. It's the "new, and improved" business model. Not that "old, and busted" business model.
We must keep the faith.
Yep. And Sony got Betamax VCRs out a year before the first VHS VCR hit the market, so I guess Betamax won, too.
Early lead != victory. (A better moral for "The Tortoise and the Hare", IMHO.)
I've been stuck on this level of the internet forever!!! Once I typed the magic word xyzzy into my address bar, I am win!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
let the race to altruism begin.
Some URLs for those who don't know yet:
Yahoo Search!
Clusty
MSN Search
Check them out when/if having problems with Google. Second one looks especially interesting. Third one is the best for warez and stuff (amazingly).
Now if we've had an alternative to groups.google.com...
Search for Slashdot on Yagoohoogle, and what do you get? THIS!
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Yahoo's Q4 2004 profits: $373,000,000
Google's Q4 2004 profits: $399,000,000
Hardly a vast difference, the thing that people forget is that while google may perhaps be technologically superior its profits aren't that much greater.
<jwales> In the interest of full disclosure I should add that Google
gave me a pen that lights up.
<jwales> When I saw that, I was like "oooh, pen!" and then I was soooo
mesmerized that I signed over the rights to everything. ha ha.
(actual quote, on IRC. It's funny; laugh.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
With Yahoo joining the club, the site obviously will get a tremendous boost in the aforementioned correlation of increased visitors producing increased accuracy. Also, with the Yahoo deal, and with other dynamic visitor-updated info sites like blogs being taken more seriously by the mainstream media, you can expect other high rolling companies to follow Yahoo's lead.
By the way, when I'm looking for an answer to any question that requires human interpretation to my query, I use ask-it-here. While I'm being informative, here's a link to a Firefox extension that lets you (I think by means of a right click) look up a word quickly on a number of sites including Wiki.
and considering that generally, Google knows how to make a decent web interface, I had a little conspi-theory attack: They are doing it on purpose. There must be something in the way of
1. Mess up Groups
2. ???
3. Profit!
in it.
Consider the little yellow thingy moving up and down as you scroll--worst since Clippy.
entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo they never liked it in there to begin with even with all the warnings.
I say we just grow up, be adults and die.
Sometimes, too many links can obfuscate important content instead of helping to direct interested parties to it.
Yep, that's true, BUT: this is only an accurate statement when integrated over time. At any given moment, it's quite possible the article has just been "spammed" or somehow defaced, either maliciously or inadvertently. You see, since the most-recently-edited version is available the moment the edit has been made, it takes some time before a damaged page gets corrected.
Unless you know this fact, and take a look at the article history, and run some careful comparisons on recent versions, you don't stand a chance of knowing how accurate THIS revision actually is.
There's this nastly little problem: it's hard to quantify the accuracy of a page, other than perhaps using some metric like "it's been three weeks since this version was edited, and 32,000 people have viewed it, and nobody decided it needed to be changed".
So to use Wikipedia as a research tool, therefore, requires quite a bit of in-depth work "behind the curtain", to assure yourself that what you're reading is on average an accepted point of view.
Still, on the whole, taken as a time-averaged issue, I agree that the overall accuracy is unmatched. And unlike a static set of bound encyclopediae, at least with Wikipedia we have the chance to correct errors, and we don't have to assume that the publisher is unbiased. In this case, it's all out on the table, both good and bad, for the user to see (but only if he chooses).
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
"The very nature of Wikipedia fights corruption. The content is created dynamically such that any 'influence' over the content would have to be universal."
Much like the Universal Influence of American culture.
It's worth remembering what type of companies yahoo and google are.
3 3235&tid=111
Yahoo you will remember pulled a fast one and ENABLED every single newsletter and other junk mail type preference automatically, even if when you signed up you specifically said you didn't want to receive junk mail.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/29/18
In other words, if Yahoo thinks they can get away with it, they will screw their users.
I havn't gotten that same sense with google yet. They havn't pulled a fast one, tried to lock up my gmail emails or any of the other stunts.
That counts for a lot with me. I just don't have time to work out what stunt Yahoo is going to pull next.
Other sources also have errors in them. Books, periodicals, broadcasts, even court testimony.
Information is trixie and false. There are no guarentees, even when witnessing something first-hand.
Students should not trust any source they find, and should try to find corroborating evidence from may sources. Students should also find out the biases of the sources they use (there are always biases) and take those into account when trying to form a complete picture of whatever they're researching.
All media are created by humans and therefore suspect. Wikipedia is no different from any other source in this sense. Wikipedia's adaptability makes it an excellent colaboration tool, but I wouldn't expect it to be either more or less accurate than any other source. The things which make it more accurate are the same things which make it less so. It balances out.
Data itself is useless. It's what one does with it which makes it valuable. The 40-bit key used with DeCSS is useless without the decoding program. Movies are not at all entertaining if one has no context within which to appreciate them. There are no facts without questions they answer and people asking those questions and reasons for asking and answering those questions. Everything is relative, everything is subjective. Objective truth is an ideal we approach asymtotically, like perfect efficiency in machines. These ideals are impossible, but worth persuing.
lol furry
If you look at the wikipedia database image download page you'll see that the text of the current English wiki is about 540Mb. I'm quite impressed that so much information can still fit onto a CD and even more impressed anyone with bandwith to spare can nab a copy. Yes you need a local MediaWiki server to do anything useful with the database but that and the support software are open-sourced and so that's not a problem either.
A full multilingual database history image is about 50GB (only half of which is English) - I think I'll let Google mirror that one...
(actual quote, on IRC. It's funny; laugh.)
No, Ma'am, it's not, it really isn't, thank you.
I've been using Wikipedia heavily (as an article author), and occasionally have to search through Wikipedia to find related content, remove duplicate articles, etc. and have had the opportunity to compare Yahoo search to Google search for this purpose. One surprise result:
the Yahoo indexes are *MUCH* better than Google. Being a committed lifelong Google fan, this surprised me. But, as they say, "competition is good". May the competition begin!
I think the number one best thing about the Internet in research is the fact that it makes people not believe the first thing they read or hear about a subject.
Back in "the olden days," if I'm interested in a subject and I look it up somewhere, I'm likely to believe 100% of what I read, regardless of how accurate it is (both factually correct and representative).
Nowadays people are accustomed to seeing crap, and therefore being skeptical of it. If I search Google for some topic and I find a dozen web sites saying something about it, I'm not very likely to believe anywhere near 100% of what I read, and I think most students aren't going to believe it either, regardless of whether it's a Geocities web page or Wikipedia. They're going to require a little more validation than just seeing a single web page asserting something.
Times have changed. If there are any students who read *anything* on the Web with the idea that it's been fact-checked and 100% true, then they're the same students who would take a purple-and-green Geocities web site about the same topic at face value.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
That is the most perfect zing of links in Wikipedia articles ever.
Give me an example. Wikipedia tends to put really good references in an 'external links' section. If you can point to a place where there was once a really good primary source on the internet that's now drowned out by the sixty copies of Wikipedia showing up on Google---and which isn't prominently linked to from the article---I'll be very, very impressed.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You know, over on Wikipedia, we call that Slashdot Style. (But seriously, see the Manual of Style on the subject of links.) Articles frequently get overlinked, and linked on the wrong things because there's a certain level of blue one gets used to seeing, and the naive user will wikify things until that level is reached, regardless if it reads like "and in the finale, [[Darth Vader]] is [[surprise|revealed]] to be [[Luke Skywalker]]'s long-lost [[father]]". (Which should really have two links in it, not four.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I know this is necessary. I know the server admins have been worked far beyond their level of volunteer competence, reduced to whining that they're not being paid, so why would the users expect silly things like more than fifty percent uptime?
And now we have corporate sponsorship. It's inherently tainted, and it's insane to think it's not, simply because the sponsors can pull out and leave the project high and dry. What happens when Yahoo!'s CEO is discovered to be a baby-eating monster, or Sergey Brin is discovered nude in an elementary school courtyard at midnight, entirely covered in peanut butter? When Google or Yahoo! demand that the articles on them be sanitized or they're pulling funding, the finding that Wikipedia would be inoperable without... well, what exactly happens then?
I'm not saying there's a better way. I'm saying doom awaits in either direction. Doomy doomy doom...
And does this mean all the people who sent in free money in the recent fund drives just pissed that away?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
There are just too many errors in Wikipedia for it be turning up when students search for things on the internet.
There are just too many errors in World Book Encyclopedia for it be turning up when students search for things in the library.
(But what do you have against Terry Semel?)
SJ on en:
Google just spidered your ass (as of writing).
Pelé!