Google News Now Trawling Wikipedia

To acknowledge the popularity and large fan-base enjoyed by online user-derived dictionary/encyclopedia Wikipedia, Google News is now including it among the stable of publications its bots crawl to generate the site. While Wikipedia’s articles have long appeared among Google search results, now when you perform a search specific to Google News, some of the returned results will feature prominent links to Wikipedia articles.

The new standard started as an experiment, visible to only a small number of Google’s searchers. The company noticed that people were using the Wikipedia articles, which are drafted by volunteers collaborating online, and moved to make the function permanent. Google found that people were utilizing the Wikipedia articles as complementary information to other sources found in their search. Google’s quest to provide relevant content to search queries is an ongoing strategy by the company that is frequently enhanced and altered.

The new strategy by Google News was actually news to Wikipedia, who learned of the enhancement through an online subject by the Nieman Journalism Lab.