Google Reference, a Wikipedia partnership? gPedia?

[slaughterbeck]

Last February (2005) Google offered to host Wikimedia projects on their servers, but just as quickly as that news surfaced it seemed to disappear. This "partnership" may be on the verge of getting more attention.


It's not news that googlepedia.com is registered to Google and just over a year ago they offered to host some of Wikimedia's projects. This page on Wikimedia even confirms they are in talks with Google but denounces rumors that hosting might include advertisements.

My curiosity was rekindled today when I noticed Google registered googlereference.net/org/info and googlereferencepages.com/net/org/info two days ago on March 6th. There are only a couple things I can guess would make sense being called "Google Reference" — one of them is an encyclopedia. What better reference is there than Wikipedia — the project Google offered to host last February?

Another possibility would be a repository strictly for manuals and reference guides. Companies that produce reference manuals could upload their information to a Google hosted repository so users can locate them easily. They could then be converted to a consistent searchable format — just like Google Video converts content to Flash.

Do you have suggestions as to what Google's interest in these new domains might be?


Source: ZDNet

 

[jeter4982]

That's very interesting, though I am not sure Wikipedia would allow Google to have the monopoly over them, as they have been in the news recently with partnerships with Yahoo and other search engines...

 

[viciouscircle]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

All text in wikipedia is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Nothing is preventing Google (or anyone else) from using the content found in Wikipedia.

 

[oldratracer]

Great Research Kimmy... I've seen some of your other posts where you've done some more in depth research as well ..it's always refreshing to see fellow domainers use research to capitalize on the "market"....(referencing one of your new reg's in another post).....

Here's my take on whats going on with googlereference.net and googlereferencepages.com etc....

http://business.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=613&id=2153562005 (you may have to register to see the article... but it's free to do so) also the scotsman.com is a GR8 resource for tech research...

Keep up the GR8 research

OldRatRacer

 

[sm]

pay per view or subscription services providing a way for monetizing google print. or maybe a service for librarians ? who knows ....

 

[3GN Media]

If it's true, that's good stuff from Google

 

[aplora]

What is the benefit for Google

This partnership deal... if true is Scary...
What is in it for Google other than analyzing the visitor patterns... Having seen the latest request from US Gov for User details from google... we just might end up in a single point of failure for Privacy...