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by snarkinatree 5159 days ago
The need to have Wikipedia in search engine results is perplexing. Why not just search Wikiepdia? It is certainly not slower. They even provide SSL.

Is it the lack of full text search on Wikipedia?

I've experimented with building a full-text search for Wikipedia. But so much of the content is just copied verbatim from the sites listed in the References and External Links, it seems not worth the effort.
1 comments
3pt14159 5159 days ago
Because Google is better searching Wikipedia than Wikipedia is.
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snarkinatree 5159 days ago
Can you provide an example search that demonstrates this?

If Wikipedia had full-text search, with a results page that looked like Google, and it was as fast as Google, would you use it?

Consider that Wikipedia is not, AFAIK, collecting your search data to serve you advertisements.

I have found that there's very few Wikipedia pages I can't pull up with a Wikipedia "search" that I could only get with a Google search.

e.g. [your browser] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/search_term =one step

versus

[your browser] http://www.google.com/search?q=search_term then finding the right result and clicking it =two steps

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