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.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)