Google donates US$ 2 million to Wikipedia

Posted by Alisa Zykova on February 22, 2010 at 6:14 AM

Search engine corporation Google has donated over US$ 2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation, a move that may reinforce the "symbiotic relationship" between Google and Wikipedia, according to Business Week. The total donations the free online encyclopaedia raised added up to US$10.6 million for its fiscal year ending in June, a 20 percent spike since the same time the previous year, wrote the Inquirer on Thursday.

There is speculation regarding why Google prefers Wikipedia to other sites, according to Business Week. One proposed explanation is that Google is Wikipedia's advertising partner.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales approximated that Wikipedia receives between 60 to 70 percent of its traffic from Google searches. Pages from the encyclopaedia show up relatively high in searches because Wikipedia has a significant amount of high-quality content that bring about lots of linking and subsequently gets ranked highly thanks to Google's PageRank technology.

Google launched its own version of Wikipedia some time ago, but the site may not have been as successful. Knol has user-generated content that authors have control over and that Google intended to pay for through advertising. The Wikipedia alternative boasted articles on various topics that were written by experts.

"Google can say they are not in the content business, but if they are paying people and distributing and archiving their work, it is getting harder to make that case," said Jason Calacanis, chief executive of Mahalo, a search engine that hires editors to write entries on different subject matter.