And also, isn't Google the largest sponsor for Wikipedia already? In 2019 - Google donated $2M [1]. In 2010, Google also donated $2m [2].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...
No, but they often ask for donations when you visit the site, which people won't see if they just see the in-line blurb from Wikipedia on the Google results page.
> In 2019 - Google donated $2M [1]. In 2010, Google also donated $2m [2].
$2M is a pittance compared to what I expect Google believes is the value of their Wikipedia blurbs. If Wikipedia could charge for use of this data (which another commenter claims they are working on doing), they could easily make orders of magnitude more money from Google.
Of course, my expectation is that Google would rather drop the Wikipedia blurbs entirely, or source the data elsewhere, than pay significantly more.
They may be able to charge for bandwidth (if you want to use a Wikipedia image, you can use Wikipedia's enterprise CDN instead of their own), but their licensing allows me to rehost content as long as I follow the attribution & sublicensing terms.
Google has no problem operating their own CDNs, so I find it unlikely that Wikipedia will be able to monetize Google search results in such a manner as you described.
Disclaimer: I work for Google; opinions are my own.
Is there a Wikipedia crawling "welfare" program if I'm not a trillion dollar mega company?
So they're pretty clearly looking to monetize organizations which consume their data in a for-profit context.
You could e.g. just cover operational cost and/or improve the service quality from it.
2 mln is probably Google's hourly profit. For that they get one of the biggest knowledge bases in the world. It's basically free as far as Google is concerned.
The instant Google becomes confident they can supplant Wikipedia, they will.
Google isn't a sponsor of Mozilla, they're a customer. Do people think Google is "sponsoring" Apple with $1.5 billion a year too?
The cynic in me thinks the product is anti-trust insurance.
These are two very different companies with a very different relationship with Google. And very different influences on Google.
Google wants to be on iOS. It brings customers to Google. A lot of them. iOS is possibly more profitable to Google than Android even with all the payments Apple extracts from them.
Google needs Mozilla so that Google may pretend that there's competition in browser space and that they don't own standards committees. The latter already isn't really true, and Google increasingly doesn't care about the former.
You don't have to guess, their numbers are public. In 2020 they made $40B in profit, so it takes them about 27 minutes to make $2M in profit.
Then, after two or five years, let it fester then abandon it. Nobody gets promoted for keeping well oiled machines running.
It was actually good for writing stuff when I tried it. Never brought in enough traffic. Killed.
That's an odd way of phrasing things. If Wikipedia were to take away free access to their data, Google wouldn't be dropping Wikipedia, Wikipedia would be dropping Google. This line of thinking "you took this when I was giving it away for free, but now I want to charge for it, so you are expected to keep paying for it" is incorrect.
$2 Million a year? Now I know why Googlers complained about having one less olive in their lunch salad.
How much does Google PROFIT from Wikipedia and how much does Wikipedia loses in fundraising when Google fails to send users to the info provider?
And most of the value of wikipedia is created by its unpaid users, not Wikimedia foundation.