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Should Google switch to Wikipedia as its ranking function for the whole web?
Google could use Wikipedia as a way to process queries to determine the sorts of non-Wikipedia web pages that should rank highly.
For example, when searching for "8 queens variants", Google might use the information here to determine which non-Wikipedia web pages to rank highly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_queens_puzzle#Related_problems
Do you think this would be a good idea?
- mooism2 15y agoI think it would lead to more spam on Wikipedia. So no, it would be a bad idea. Note that Wikipedia already discourage search engines from interpreting their links as endorsements (rel=nofollow) for precisely this reason.
- RBerenguel 15y agoAgreed with your point (although I wasn't aware of wp's nofollow rule).
- amichail 15y agoWikipedia already has mechanisms in place for dealing with spam. Wikipedia and Google might rise up to the challenge of dealing with more spam on Wikipedia arising from using it as a ranking function.
- guptaneil 15y agoThere are already multiple search algorithms that have been proposed that use Wikipedia to cluster and sort search results based on the relationships gathered from Wikipedia. They haven't been able to show any meaningful increase in search accuracy over Google's existing PageRank algorithm though.