[Wikipedia-l] Parasitic behaviour. We loose more than money by it.

Mon Apr 12 01:49:37 UTC 2004

I know this is not new, but I'm rather pissed off to see Google returns
several commercial sites featuring all Wikipedia articles on a request
explicitly specifying "Wikipedia" as search term, and on top of the real
thing.

I figure more and more of these sites will pop up when people realize how
easy it is to make money this way, and probably loads of it.

E.g. "rembrandt wikipedia"
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=wikipedi
a+rembrandt
shows Wikipedia only behind two other sites, one of which uses "Rembrandt -
Wikipedia" even in the <title>..</title> tags, which is shown prominently in
the Google response.

I know GDFL is very permissive, but is there nothing we can do about this?
Even if we don't want the money, which is also an old discussion, we might
at least attract more contributors if  parasitic sites (not all mirrors are
in this category) were less succesful.

Could we not strike a deal with Google similar to the one with Yahoo by
which Google favours the original content instead of outdated copies, should
be in their interest too.

Erik Zachte