Research and Sharing Information on the Internet has been Revolutionized by Google and Wikipedia

chillibreeze writer — Roy Daniel Silva

Of Googloid Mages and Wikipedian Warriors

The Google Revolution

The Internet wasn't always as we know it to be today. A few years ago, if one would be searching for air tickets from London to New York over the Internet, chances were that they would first have to skim through a thousand and more advertisements for everything ranging from travel to staying services. All this has changed, or shall we say – Googled – now.

One isn't sure whether the two PH.D students knew what effect their research project would have on the Internet within ten years. Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Stanford believed that a better and more powerful search engine than the ones already available is possible. Their basic concept was simple, bright and workable.

The Power of Links

According to the concept, the importance of a website could be gauged by the number of its back-links, the number of incoming links into the said website. It is this revolutionary concept that has brought Google from its humble beginnings at a garage in Menlo Park, California to the current Googleplex in Mountainview, California. This concept was accompanied by the highly-criticized-but-also-successful Web Cache feature. Through this feature, a copy of whatever documents are requested by the user is saved. This results in a reduced bandwidth usage.

Clutter-free Zone

There are various other factors that have played an important role in the success of Google. One of them is that Google got rid of image advertisements. All of their advertisements are text-based, and therefore do not disturb a surfer on their website. Google was, and is, high on search content and very low on advertisements content, at least the kind which is visually distracting.

For example, if one searches for “Roy Daniel D'Silva” via Google, it will give at least one more search result than similar search engines. Another advantage Google has over other search engines is that the home page of Google, through which users can search is absolutely non-cluttered and has no graphically distracting visual advertisements.

Free Sources

Google is therefore a front ranker in the process of making the Internet a better, safer and more productive place to work on. With the advent of free source, there are many options available to the common surfer for finding information and researching on the Internet, chief among them being Mozilla Firefox, Internet browser, and Wikipedia, the free source on line encyclopedia.

Wikipedia works on the general concept that if users collaborate with each other, the quality of the articles they write will gradually increase. This model also allows rapid updates to the data found on the website.

Quite simply put, Wikipedia is a multi-lingual on-line dictionary freely available on the internet. The site is completely written by volunteers. The volunteers need not be formally trained or have any expertise in the articles they choose to edit. It allows any one with a Wikipedia account to change or add content.

Sharing Information

All the articles on Wikipedia are freely available under the GNU Free Documentation License. The GFDL permits the redistribution; creating of derivative works and commercial use of its content provided the authors are attributed and its content are available under the GFDL.

The popularity of Wikipedia, which was originally started as a sister concern of the expert written Nupedia, has given birth to many other sister projects like Wikitionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews and Wikiquotes.

There are about 200 language versions of Wikipedia and almost 10 of them have more than 50,000 articles each. Some of the languages Wikipedia is available in are English, German, French, Japanese, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese.

Though the concept may seem a bit tricky, and the very description of the website allows one to wonder about the authenticity and factual existence of the data found on Wikipedia, the website is intricately monitored and any suspicious data is quickly analyzed, changed, or accepted to be fact by countless volunteers all over the globe.

Like every open source project, it has its own flaws like vandalism, inaccuracy and sometimes, even blatant opinion. However, it should be said that these flaws are being quickly fine tuned into nothingness.

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—About our writer:

Roy Daniel D'Silva is someone who doesn't like to attach adjectives to himself. He is currently thinking why Dungeon Siege II doesn't have as many teleporters as would be necessary to make the game simple a la Dungeon Siege.