dwarfking - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google or Wikipedia - Which is your first stop?

Submitted by dwarfking on Wednesday October 11, 2006 @10:49AM

dwarfking writes: Over the last several months I have noticed that more and more often when I am searching for information on the web, I find myself starting at Wikipedia instead of Google. It used to be that the first hit on many of my Google searches linked to Wikipedia articles, so I started going there first.

I've found that except for searching for current events, by starting with Wikipedia I get a good explanation of the topic of interest and the pages generally have links to other good resources that are right on topic. No need to scroll through dozens of hits.

So my question to the slashdot community is, are others of you seeing similar shifts in your search usage and if so, do any of you think this could become a trend for the larger community? If so, then what could that potentially mean for Google?

Submission + - Content owners want to charge royalties on search

Submitted by dwarfking on Friday September 22, 2006 @12:20PM

dwarfking writes: Ok, maybe I'm a little dense here, but isn't this plan more of an impact to the content provider than to the search engines. From the article:

In one example of how ACAP would work, a newspaper publisher could grant search engines permission to index its site, but specify that only select ones display articles for a limited time after paying a royalty.

So, ok, a search engine company decides it doesn't want to pay royalties and therefor doesn't index the provider's site. Now won't the provider actually lose readers since their articles won't be locatable by search anymore?

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