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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'.
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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.
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.
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"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.
Wikipedia will not turn into the object of spammers and so.
I see hard times coming.
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The main reason I'm excited about Yahoo's recent surge of activity and announcements is that it will up the ante for Google and increase competition between the two companies. C'mon, Google, look at Yahoo! Redouble your efforts!
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So, the competition catches up.. that makes Google not as good any more?
That doesn't really make any sense.
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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.
It's worth remembering what type of companies yahoo and google are.
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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.
But 98% of google's profits are from advertising, which only makes up a much smaller part of Yahoo's profits. So if the online advertising world were to shift even slightly Google would be broke.