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.
