· Firefoxman wrote: can The barrier to using a solution such as Google's "search appliance" is philosophical rather than technical or financial (although those may also pose certain challenges). The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to support open source software, and Google is not open source. What needs to happen is for a group of developers to develop a new search engine (or adapt an existing open source engine) so it can be embedded into MediaWiki. Our expectations of what a search engine can do are set by Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Of course, it's "impossible" for any volunteer-driven open-source project to compete with a well-funded product from a major corporation. I mean, that would be like taking on Internet Explorer, or Microsoft Office, or... hmmm... Encyclopedia Brittanica. -Rich _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On 03/02/07, · Firefoxman <enwpmail(a)gmail.com> wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Henrik/sandbox/google-search

Google search wouldn't pick up orphans much either. We should be aiming to improve our inbuilt search, rather than going back to using Google by default (yes, we did have all searches going through Google or Yahoo! for a long time there). Google's search has a number of critical flaws like inability to search for punctuation and automatic spell correction where no such correction is desired. It would be nice to have boolean searching work on Wikipedia, but that's a topic for another mailing list entirely.