[Foundation-l] excluding Wikipedia clones from searching

Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il
Wed Dec 8 11:46:25 UTC 2010


The "Google test" used to be a tool for checking the notability of a subject
or to find sources about it. For some languages it may be also used for
other purposes - for example in Hebrew, the spelling of which is not
established so well, it is very frequently used for finding the most common
spelling, especially for article titles. It was never the ultimate tool, of
course, but it was useful. With the proliferation of sites that
indiscriminately copy Wikipedia content it is becoming less and less useful.

For some time i used to fight this problem by adding "-site:wikipedia.org-site:
wapedia.mobi -site:miniwiki.org" etc. to my search queries, but i hit a
wall: Google limits the search string to 32 words, and today there are many
more than 32 sites that clone Wikipedia, so this trick is also becoming
useless.

I know that some Wikipedias customized Special:Search, adding other search
engines except Wikipedias built-in one. I tried to see whether any Wikipedia
added an ability to search using Google (or Bing, or Yahoo, or any other
search engine) excluding Wikipedia clones. Does anyone know whether it's
possible to build such a thing? And maybe it already exists and i didn't
search well enough?

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore


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