Why Doesn’t Google Buy Wikipedia?
January 30th, 2007
How come Google hasn’t bought Wikipedia yet? Google usually buys technology over traffic (although with youtube that’s changing), and Wikipedia fits well being the first to do wiki.
Not only that, but Google heavily favors wikipedia results at the top of their own search results, and references it often. Even some internal documents and contract employee instructions reference wikipedia in some cases.
With a significant portion of their rankings based on Wikipedia, would it make sense for Google to just purchase it? Or does having it remain an independant 3rd party help Google remain unbiased* and credible?
* - some would argue that automatically ranking Wikipedia results high introduces another type of bias.
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2 Comments
1. Sage | January 30th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
The main reason is, Wikipedia is a not-for-profit and is not for sale. The Wikipedia community is strongly against ads, so it would be tough to monetize Wikipedia in any case.
In the past, Google has actually offered to host Wikipedia, but even that much dependency on a corporation was too much to take.
2. berni | August 23rd, 2007 at 7:53 am
woooouughhh,
Wikipedia is definitely the hottest unclaimed stake in the internet world.
In one sense, I want to be part of it (to make money!), but in another sense, i think it is better that it remains a nature reserve, allowing all the flowers and animals to develop without the oversight of farmers and real estate developers..