[WikiEN-l] Microsoft kills Encarta

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 9:57 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/3/31 Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>:
> > On 31/03/2009, doc <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> >> The Library of Alexandria was with us for between 350 and a thousand
> >> years (depending on which history book you read), Wikipedia has been
> >> with us for a total of 8.
>
> > Yes, and it's been ranked about 8 on the entire freaking internet for
> > a lot of that time! Things that happen relatively early on in the
> > course of something (like the internet) tend to get 'frozen in' and
> > have much longer life than you would expect they could have, google
> > for example is not going away any time soon.
>
>
> Note that Google came from nowhere, by word of mouth, to become top
> search engine because of being much better than the other
> heavily-promoted search engines. Much like Wikipedia's rise to fame.


None of the tools were that well promoted, really - Altavista had been a
research experiment that Digital tried to capitalize on, and Yahoo was too
stuck on directories / organizing and too little on content.  PR as we know
it was still very primitive on the net.

But Google did rise by being better.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com