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Yahoo! Search Providing Support to Wikipedia

Posted by Zonk on from the yahoogle dept.

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."

16 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Yahoo! is turning around... by k3v1n · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.)

    1. Re:Yahoo! is turning around... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I agree, and I'm pleased to see it. Frankly I'm tired of seeing a story posted on slashdot for any little thing that comes out of google.

    2. Re:Yahoo! is turning around... by Espectr0 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      The author's contention is that Yahoo! has caught up to Google in nearly aspect, and have surpassed them in several areas.
      I read that article.
      1. Says yahoo mail has the same 1gb space. Now gmail has 2, and even if it didn't, gmail is better
      2. Says yahoo maps is better because it has live traffic. I tried it out, and got the same map image with or without the traffic indicator. So i guess i had bad luck
      3. Developer tools. I don't use them so i don't know if yahoo's are better
      4. Yahoo has movie search. But IIRC, google announced that too some days ago
      5. Better research labs. Yes, yahoo seems to announce researchers and lets you download papers. It has yet to be seen if the stuff they can cook up with is better than google's. So far, i like google maps better and google suggest
      6. Search is still google's strength. I went to the yagoohoogle site, and searched for itself. Guess which search was better? Google's number 1 link was yagoohoogle, yahoo was some weird site talking about it
      --
      Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
  2. Re:How about from two? by CDarklock · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't see how a vendor can influence a Wiki any more easily than it can influence the market. It strikes me that you would have to fundamentally alter the way Wikipedia works for any such influence to make even a slight difference.

    Of course, I might be overlooking something. How do you suggest the vendor might influence Wikipedia? What could a similar site do to prevent such influence?

    --
    Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
  3. Re:good news by slapout · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If wikimedia starts becoming evil, someone can (and will) fork the project and re-release the entire thing.

    I certainly hope so. Remember what happened to CDDB (aka Gracenote)? And to a lesser extent IMDB.

    --
    Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
  4. Re:Bad trend by c0p0n · · Score: 3, Interesting

    sure, because any other free resource on the internet is more trustworthy than the wipiedia you mean?

    --

    Your head a splode
  5. Re:good news by gowen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But those were possible because the (lack of) license / copyright on the information enabled the guardians of that information to make a succesful "Knowledge Grab"

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
  6. Speaking of Y! Search by ceeam · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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...

  7. BIAS! by Swamii · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Search for Slashdot on Yagoohoogle, and what do you get? THIS!

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    Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
  8. Yahoo isn't that far behind! by JaF893 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Yahoo isn't that far behind! by gniv · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Yes, but:
      Yahoo employee count: 7600
      Google employee count: 3021
      And how much older is Yahoo? They had plenty of time to make bigger profits, yet they don't.
  9. I thought Jimbo had already sold out to Google... by FooAtWFU · · Score: 4, Interesting

    <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.
  10. Re:Bad trend by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Sure, if I spew some blatantly false blather, someone will eventually catch it and fix it. But how long will the wrong information be out there for some poor student to see and think is true vetted "peer-reviewed" data?

    I've seen false content last a year.

    But besides incorrect information, there's what's missing. I see people add legitimate information, and some guy deletes it, lies in the edit summary and ticks "minor edit", and nobody ever notices.

  11. Too many links. by AyeRoxor! · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sometimes, too many links can obfuscate important content instead of helping to direct interested parties to it.

  12. Size of Wiki by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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...

  13. Relative quality of indexing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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!