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.
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.
Why not offer all:
Search box - search button - radio button "Go" (preselected) - radio
button "fulltext" - radio button "Google"
Magnus