G'day Brion and the Group

Hmmm...

At 02:10 AM 4/12/03 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:

On Dec 4, 2003, at 01:47, Andrew Alder wrote:

But the probability that Google indexes a particular version is roughly proportional to the time for which that version is the current version. Therefore, the version presented by Google is on average more stable than the "current" version. I tried to point this out, but I'm afraid I didn't do it very clearly.

When somebody clicks the link in the Google search results they see the *current* version, not Google's crawl-time cached copy (unless they happen to know what the Google cache is, how to use it, and prefer to do so instead of clicking through to the page itself, which is sure to be a vanishingly small proportion of visitors). The key words in the search are likely to be in the title itself or general description, and will probably be fairly stable across revisions.

No argument at all with any of this. Again, perhaps I haven't expressed myself very well.

Assuming also that our meta data or whatever their bots follow keeps the spider out of the history (a good assumption I hope), the link from the Google search results will point to the current version, regardless of which version was retrieved by the crawler. The only difference is in the searching that produces the result list. So, as far as which version is presented (=targeted) by the *link* is concerned, Google is realtime.

But surely this supports the idea that, for a *reader*, Google is *no worse* than an in-house search?

Google is how people get _to_ Wikipedia and does a good job at it; as an internal navigation mechanism it's wholly unsatisfactory for contributors who need to be able to check the current state of things in detail.

Again, agree. I've now been through this both on the list and on the Pump. My comments relate to *readers*, not *contributors*.

Contributors certainly need fully realtime tools, which means in-house. I said that before.

Andrew A

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