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Wikipedia Better Search Results than Google  

What is wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that is available online and can be accessed and edited by anyone and everyone. In the words of Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, this is “….an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest quality to every single person on the planet in their own language….”

The website offers 198 free encyclopedias, each in a different language; the largest one is the English version which has about 400,000 entries. 

The authors or contributors of these articles are given the freedom of expressing their opinion and writing whatever they desire to. However, a new discussion board has been set up recently to discuss entries on politically sensitive issues such as Israel, Palestine, and the Iraq war. Wikipedia clearly mentions that all the entries need to be neutral. Unfortunately this regulation is not always followed and a group of experts are always on a lookout for such articles which they correct and re-edit. 

Who is the owner of Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is run by the non profit organization, The Wikipedia Foundation; this foundation also looks after the operations of the sister projects of wikipedia including Wikitionary or ‘a wiki dictionary’ and Wikibooks or ‘textbooks’.

Why is wikipedia so popular?

Some reasons which I think makes this website so popular are:

Very clear about its purpose – As mentioned earlier, wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. People who want to access it know exactly what they want and what they are looking for. Besides, if you are interested to make some contributions (through articles), you know what sort of content is required to match its standards.
Significance – Imagine this! You can get all sorts of information about almost every possible topic under the sun! Isn’t that a great idea? Accumulation of human knowledge at one place is a grand goal to achieve.

Quality of articles – It is not only important to make a contribution but also ensure that the contributed one matches up to the quality of the website. Any article that is going to be incorporated in an encyclopedia must have the following features – (1) There must be a clear explanation about the product and its significance. (2) A brief detail about the history of its history and origin. (3) Some extra opinions along with expert opinions and overviews, if any. (4) Any criticisms faced. Besides, the style and format should be simple and comprehensible. It is pretty obvious that if all the information are so well arranged, who would not like to visit this site over and over again.

Breaking into several chapters – It is evident that the articles discussed in any encyclopedia are huge and contain lot of information. However, it is difficult to hold the attention of the viewer if an article exceeds a couple of pages. To combat this, wikipedia breaks its information into small chapters; so if an article is too big, they are broken into manageably sized articles and split into different chapters. A small page looks comfortable (imagine seeing a page loaded with information) and also easy to handle. It can read fast and can also be comprehended without much difficulty. However, all the pieces are equally important in their own rights na dalso extremely enlightening.

Google and Wikipedia

Recently while I had been surfing the net, I read some interesting posts about wikipedia and our very own Google. The grapevine is that very soon Wikipedia will replace Google as the leading search sites on the net. some people have even argued that Wikipedia is already the top ranked site online. I think I know the cause of this passing thought! Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that has a wide range of topics (many of the articles have included resources from the Google searches on that topic). It has been observed that over time this online encyclopedia has enriched itself with almost the whole of the web’s knowledge base and is turning out to be better and better each day. One of its biggest advantages – it just does not list links like the other link directories but also gives a brief history about them. Wikipedia is also becoming an ‘unspammed ‘reference matter of what are the relevant and valuable resources. This is important as off late Google has not been very successful in providing assistance for many product-oriented searches when the results are dominated either by so-called shopping engines or supplemental results.

So you see, even though it is pretty early to say that Wikipedia is far better than Google, there is a high probability that this site will soon become the best beating not only Google but also the others of the same capacity.