Sweet Silhouette - Myras Little Blog: Google wants to Host Wikipedia or its Content

Saturday, February 12, 2005

Google wants to Host Wikipedia or its Content

Google Inc. plans to host Wikipedia content or the whole Wikimedia Foundation resources on its servers.
Google made an initial offer to the Wikimedia Board. It will be discussed by the members of the Wikimedia Board and Wikimedia developers.
In March 2005 the plans will be substantiated in a Meeting with Google represantatives.

The steps of Google towards Wikipedia are not surprising. Competitors like Clusty.com, MSN Search or Yahoo offer searching through encyclopedias too.
Clusty.com offers the english Wikipedia, MSN Search their Encarta and Yahoo has access to the Columbia Encyclopedia.

It is possible that Google plans to implement Wikipedia results as an inline feature ( called Google Web Search Features) similar as they already offer Froogle results, Stock Quotes or map info on top of the search results.
That would be helpful because Wikipedia often already is the top result of many searches and appropoiate formatting could make the results more transparent.

On the other hand anyone can offer Wikipedia content as long as the presentation complies with the GNU Free Documentation License. So Google Inc. could run a noneditable Wikpiedia mirror and even present its adverting Adwords. So far Google did not require to implement Adwords in their offer.

They already share an Open Content Project: called Google Directory (http://dir.google.com/) which is an altered version of Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org/).

Here is an excerpt of the original Wikimedia statement:

Google Inc. has made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects.

The terms of the offer are currently being discussed by the board. The developer committee has been informed of some of the details via email. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005.

Please note that this agreement does not mean there is any requirement for us to include advertising on the site.
This statement is not an official statement of Wikimedia Foundation Inc. It was reported by board member Angela Beesley and is her unique responsability.