Is Google a Wikipedia Wrapper?
It seems more and more like Google is being reduced to a Wikipedia wrapper. I recently asked several of my friends to guess the percentage of their Google searches that reference Wikipedia articles on the first page of results. The guesses ranged from 40% to 70%, which were inline with my own guess of 70%. So then I decided to take a more scientific approach… via Firefox Extensions. Most of my friends use Firefox now so they should all be able to participate in this study if I can create a non-invasive extension that tracks the number of Google searches that reference Wikipedia on the first page. It shouldn’t take long at all to create a basic implementation of the extension. The basic features would be tracking, high-lighting, and reporting. I am going to start development on the extension as soon as I finish making this post. So right now!… I’ll let you know how it turns out.
UPDATE (08-15-2006)
GooWiki is available to download at http://www.etherice.com/xpi/goowiki. Please use it and send feedback!
