Relationship between Google and Wikipedia

Last updated

Presentation of different projects between Google and Wikimedia during WikiArabia 2019 conference in Marrakesh (in Arabic).

The relationship between Google and Wikipedia was originally collaborative in Wikipedia's early days, when Google helped reduce the pagerank of widespread, uneditable Wikipedia clones that were ostensibly ad farms.[ citation needed ] In 2007, Google introduced Knol, a direct competitor for community-driven encyclopedia creation, which was subsequently shut down in 2012. Google later supported Wikimedia with numerous grants, and came to rely on Wikipedia for solving the problem of spreading misinformation on YouTube, providing verifiable and well-sourced information to those seeking it. Google and Wikimedia Enterprise started a partnership in 2021. [1]

Contents

History

In 2007, Google introduced Knol, an encyclopedia with user-generated content. The New York Times compared Wikipedia to Knol at the time, [2] and it was largely seen as a direct competitor. [3] Knol was largely seen as a failure, and the project was closed and subsequently deleted in 2012. [4]

In 2008, various news sources reported that most of Wikipedia's traffic came from referrals from Google search. [5]

In February 2010, Google gave US$2,000,000 as its first grant to the Wikimedia Foundation. [6] [7] Google founder Sergey Brin commented that "Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet". [6]

In May 2012, Google launched a project known as the Google Knowledge Graph, which produced knowledge panels alongside traditional search engine results. Later, results from querying the knowledge graph complemented string-based search in producing the ranked list of search results as well. A large amount of the information presented in the knowledge panel infoboxes is retrieved from Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook . [8]

In January 2019, Google donated $3 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. [9] [10] [11] [12]

In June 2022, Google and the Internet Archive were announced as Wikimedia Enterprise's first customers, though only Google will be paying for the service. [13]

Google's reliance on Wikipedia to combat misinformation

In March 2018, YouTube announced that they would be using information from Wikipedia to address the problem of misinformation on the website. [14] On videos about certain topics such as the September 11 attacks, the Apollo program, the 2020 United States presidential election, and the COVID-19 pandemic, information panels are included below the video. [15] [16] These panels are intended to combat misinformation. They contain information sourced directly from Wikipedia, along with other websites such as Encyclopædia Britannica , The World Factbook , and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.[ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Search</span> Search engine from Google

Google Search is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the Internet by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. It is the most popular search engine worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexa Internet</span> American web traffic analysis company (1996–2022)

Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google</span> American multinational technology company

Google LLC is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and as one of the world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the field of AI. Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. is one of the five Big Tech companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

Wikiseek was a search engine that indexed English Wikipedia pages and pages that were linked to from Wikipedia articles. The search engine was funded by a Palo Alto based Internet startup SearchMe and was officially launched on January 17, 2007. Most of the funding came from Sequoia Capital. It used Google ads on its search returns to generate profit. As of 2008 it is no longer active.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amit Singhal</span> American computer engineer

Amitabh Kumar "Amit" Singhal is a former senior vice president at Google Inc., having been a Google Fellow and the head of Google's Search team for 15 years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Foundation</span> American charitable organization

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is best known as the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. However, the foundation also hosts 14 other related content projects. It also supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software that underpins them all.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knol</span> Discontinued Google project

Knol was a Google project that aimed to include user-written articles on a range of topics. The lower-case term knol, which Google defined as a "unit of knowledge", referred to an article in the project. Knol was often viewed as a rival to Wikipedia.

WolframAlpha is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It is offered as an online service that answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DuckDuckGo</span> American software company and Web search engine

DuckDuckGo is an American software company that offers a number of products intended to help people protect their online privacy. The flagship product is a search engine that has been praised by privacy advocates. Subsequent products include extensions for all major web browsers and a custom DuckDuckGo web browser.

Qwiki was a New York City–based startup automated video production company acquired by Yahoo! on July 2, 2013 for a reported $50 million. Qwiki released an iPhone app that automatically turns the pictures and videos from a user's camera roll into movies to share. The company's initial product, an iPad application that created video summaries of over 3 million search terms, was downloaded more than 3 million times and named by Apple as the best "Search and Reference" application of 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Knowledge Graph</span> Knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engines results

The Google Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base from which Google serves relevant information in an infobox beside its search results. This allows the user to see the answer in a glance, as an instant answer. The data is generated automatically from a variety of sources, covering places, people, businesses, and more.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Facebook Graph Search</span> Semantic search engine by Facebook

Facebook Graph Search was a semantic search engine that Facebook introduced in March 2013. It was designed to give answers to user natural language queries rather than a list of links. The name refers to the social graph nature of Facebook, which maps the relationships among users. The Graph Search feature combined the big data acquired from its over one billion users and external data into a search engine providing user-specific search results. In a presentation headed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was announced that the Graph Search algorithm finds information from within a user's network of friends. Microsoft's Bing search engine provided additional results. In July it was made available to all users using the U.S. English version of Facebook. After being made less publicly visible starting December 2014, the original Graph Search was almost entirely deprecated in June 2019.

Google Search, offered by Google, is the most widely used search engine on the World Wide Web as of 2023, with over eight billion searches a day. This page covers key events in the history of Google's search service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timeline of web search engines</span>

This page provides a full timeline of web search engines, starting from the WHOis in 1982, the Archie search engine in 1990, and subsequent developments in the field. It is complementary to the history of web search engines page that provides more qualitative detail on the history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knowledge Engine (search engine)</span> Search engine project

Knowledge Engine (KE) was a search engine project initiated in 2015 by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to locate and display verifiable and trustworthy information from public-information sources in a way that was less reliant on traditional search engines. It aimed to allow readers to stay on Wikipedia.org and other Wikipedia-related projects when looking for additional information rather than returning to proprietary search engines. Its goal was to protect user privacy, to be open and transparent about how a piece of information originates, and to allow access to related metadata.

Commercial use of Wikimedia projects refers to any business or product selling content from Wikipedia or Wikimedia projects which it freely took. Wikimedia projects use free and open copyright licenses which means that anyone may share the information for any purpose.

Foursquare Labs Inc., commonly known as Foursquare, is a geolocation technology company and data cloud platform based in the United States. Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009, the company rose to prominence with the launch of its local search-and-discovery mobile app. The app, Foursquare City Guide, popularized the concept of real-time location sharing and checking-in.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikipedia and fact-checking</span> Culture and practice of fact-checking in Wikipedia

Wikipedia's volunteer editor community has the responsibility of fact-checking Wikipedia's content. Their aim is to curb the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation by the website.

You.com is a personalization-focused search engine. It allows its users to upvote, downvote, or block results. You.com provides additional products, including a chatbot called YouChat, an AI writing tool called YouWrite, and an AI-image generator called YouImagine, which utilizes AI models Stable Diffusion and OpenJourney.

References

  1. ↑ "Wikipedia Is Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  2. ↑ Helft, Miguel (15 December 2007). "Wikipedia Competitor Being Tested by Google". The New York Times.
  3. ↑ Sullivan, Danny (23 July 2008). "Google's Knol Launches: Like Wikipedia, With Moderation - Search Engine Land". Search Engine Land.
  4. ↑ "Google Announces Plans To Shutter Knol, Friend Connect, Wave, And More". TechCrunch. 22 November 2011. Retrieved 2022-05-05.[ permanent dead link ]
  5. ↑ Teglet, Traian (15 May 2008). "Wikipedia Traffic, Mostly from Google". softpedia.
  6. 1 2 Johnson, Bobbie (18 February 2010). "Wikipedia wins the Google lottery - but why?". the Guardian.
  7. ↑ Walsh, Jay. "Wikimedia Foundation announces $2 million grant from Google". wikimediafoundation.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Archived from the original on 29 May 2018. Retrieved 27 January 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  8. ↑ Singhal, Amit (May 16, 2012). "Introducing the Knowledge Graph: Things, Not Strings". Google Official Blog. Retrieved January 23, 2022.
  9. ↑ Dickey, Megan Rose (22 January 2019). "Google.org donates $2 million to Wikipedia's parent org". TechCrunch.
  10. ↑ Litman-Navarro, Kevin (23 January 2019). "Google will conquer the world one charitable donation at a time". The Outline.
  11. ↑ Gomes, Ben; Fuller, Jacquelline (22 January 2019). "Expanding knowledge access with the Wikimedia Foundation". Google.
  12. ↑ Gruwell, Lisa (22 January 2019). "Google and Wikimedia Foundation partner to increase knowledge equity online". Wikimedia Foundation.
  13. ↑ Roth, Emma (June 22, 2022). "Google is paying the Wikimedia Foundation for better access to information". The Verge . Archived from the original on June 23, 2022. Retrieved June 23, 2022.
  14. ↑ Etherington, Darrell (14 March 2018). "Wikipedia wasn't aware of YouTube's conspiracy video plan". TechCrunch.
  15. ↑ "Election information panels - YouTube Help". support.google.com. Retrieved 2022-05-05.
  16. ↑ "Information panel giving topical context - YouTube Help". support.google.com. Retrieved 2022-05-05.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.