[WikiEN-l] Effect of Index

[FT2]

While the future isn't yet known, at present internal search is only
accessible as a specialist "wikipedia search engine".

For better or worse it's like any forum search; in that there is no major
external interface and it has not become widely relied on like google or
similar as a routine port of call for anyone seeking in-depth information on
a person (the main reason for NOINDEXing of pages).

An employer for example is far more likely to use google or yahoo, than
wikipedia internal search, partly because of prominence, familiarity, lack
of awareness, and because most people checking if someone's "known" online
don't exhaustively search every place they might have an account -- they
google them or look on major social networking sites. Wikipedia is big, but
it's no more a routine "major social networking site" than many others. In
that context myspace, facebook, blogs, spidered news media, and personal web
pages are far better known and used.

Should that change and Wikipedia become a prominent "first place to search
for non-notable people one knows or might be interested in who might have a
real-name mention on there as an account owner" (not that likely) then at
that point NOINDEX might conceivably switch to signify "don't return this in
an internal search if the user isn't approved/is unconfirmed/isn't an admin,
or whatever it at that point. Or there might be a list of "terms not to
return on NOINDEXed user and project pages" that would mean someone
searching for an incident as an incident might find a page but someone
entering a real name as a search term would not. But that's not presently on
the horizons.

Some thoughts.

FT2




On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 8:08 PM, <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:

> Why couldn't a person simply scan userspace using all sorts of  searches on
> "the" and "and" and so on, and simply repost the entire contents  with deep
> links to an external indexed page?
>
> No indexing and then allowing internal searches anyway seems like hiding an
>  elephant behind a bucket.
>
>
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