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

[Brion Vibber]

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Brian wrote:
| 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.

Lucene is a low-level indexing library, not a search engine -- the
search engine we've built around it is very much customized, and a lot
of new development on it is still ongoing.

Google's general purpose web search will likely never be able to include
Wikipedia-specific features such as searching for template invocations
and category intersections -- opportunities we have as long as we're in
control.

More generally, Wikimedia has a strong commitment to make all our tools
available to the world for use, reuse, and further development,
strengthening the public infrastructure with open source software. By
handing off all responsibility for search to a highly secretive,
proprietary company, we'd be abandoning that responsibility.

Given the choice of an open tool which is imperfect, but can be improved
to everyone's benefit, and a closed tool which is pretty good, but is
kept under lock and key, our mission requires us to choose the open tool.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
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