Microsoft challenges Wikipedia with Encarta giveaway
While unveiling its new search technology last Monday, Microsoft not only took aim at its competition among other search engines. It also made a move with significant implications for Wikipedia by promoting the fact that it would offer Encarta content free along with its search results.
This marked a significant expansion of freely available encyclopedia content from Encarta, which previously offered only a limited selection of articles for free. Until now, premium content from Encarta had been limited to subscribers, with Microsoft charging $4.95 per month or $29.95 annually for the service. Some Encarta tools, such as homework help and some maps, will remain limited to subscribers.
Although Microsoft plugged the incorporation of Encarta content into its search engine as an innovation, it follows several others that have already used encyclopedia content from Wikipedia to enhance their search results. Wikipedia was included in Yahoo!'s Content Acquisition Program unveiled last March, and has been featured prominently in search results from Clusty since it released its beta in September.
Recently, Clusty has even added a new feature to its search results by providing thumbnails of Wikipedia images when available, a fact covered by Mark Hall of Computerworld in a notes column last Monday. And while Google makes less of an effort to boost the prominence of encyclopedia content in its search results, it recently switched its "definitions" results over from Dictionary.com to Answers.com, a service that provides not only dictionary definitions but encyclopedia content, both from Wikipedia and the Columbia Encyclopedia.