[Foundation-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

Wed Mar 12 16:03:38 UTC 2008

If we were to make a deal with Google to use their site search by default as
the search engine on Wikipedia, we would not only make boatloads of money,
but we would save money for not rendering that page billions of times a
year.

Not to mention that our fairly default installation of Lucene is pretty much
awful. What exactly does "Relevance" mean? What about the article was
relevant? Presumably showing snippets is so computationally expensive when
done billions of times that we can't afford it. We've got a little bit of
link analysis in there, but Google's algorithms do a much better job, as
they know not only Wikipedia's internal structure, but how it fits in with
the rest of the web. Using Google's search engine instead of our stripped
down Lucene would be an improvement in usability, make us money and save us
money.

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 9:42 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> And this has *some* value, which shouldn't be wasted.
>
> BTW, "take money for WMF from Google for promotion on the search page"
> is not something which I invented in the previous mail. It is an idea
> from at least the first half of 2006 which I heard from Delphine.
>
>