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"