Google and Wikipedia, ..strong indications that they cooperate Options

[Zvetiki]

Researchers at TU Graz have issued a report on the power of Google, which I have not seen mentioned here; ignore this message if it already had been discussed.

This report investigates the power that Google has over current information reception today. We all know that what does not exist in Google is hardly visible to the world; and obviously, the ordering of search results has a big influence on what kind of information the interested searcher gets to see.

Of particular interest to the readers of this board may be the section, "Empirical Evidence of the Google-Wikipedia Connection", investigating the position of Wikipedia entries in search results on Google and other search engines.

Since most material that is written today is based on Google and Wikipedia, if those two do
not reflect reality, the picture we are getting through “googeling reality” as Stephan Weber
calls it, is not reality, but the Google-Wikipedia version of reality. There are strong indications
that Google and Wikipedia cooperate: some sample statistics show that random selected
entries in Wikipedia are consistently rated higher in Google than in other search engines.

...

The other conclusion is scary: Google does in a strange and unknown way privilege Wikipedia entries –
followed by Yahoo; and Google does this intentionally more with the German version.

The full report is available from TU Graz.

[thekohser]

Sorry, I just can't tolerate scholarly research written in "English" like this:

It has to be recognized that Internet and the WWW also need such regulations, and if international regulations that are strong enough cannot be passed, then as only saving step an anti-Trust suite against Google has to be initiated...

If anybody is concerned about "beating" Wikipedia in Google search, then they need to examine why Centiare (~30,000 pages) is able to beat Wikipedia (2,100,000+ pages) on some unusual searches.

"Liz Cohen" performance artist

flauxbam

stone crab scientific video

In each Google search, a Wikipedia page is returned and a Centiare page is returned, but the Centiare page is higher in the search results. How is that possible?

Greg