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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

I've been shouting for years how google should know by now, if there is a relevant wikipedia page, it should be at the top of the results -- not number 2 or 3, number 1. Every time.

Likewise IMDB (not that I'm fond of the site, if there were an alternative I'd switch in a heartbeat) -- if I search for "bogart bacall" then the top six results should be IMDB and Wikipedia for The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and Key Largo.

How google hasn't figured that out in the past fifteen years is a mystery.

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How google hasn't figured that out in the past fifteen years is a mystery.

It has. Google knows exactly what it's doing.

It's just that Google makes money from keeping you searching, not from giving you the right answer.

Let’s dispel with this fiction that Google doesn’t know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing. They're trying to change the internet.

Is this a Rubio quote?

Yeah, it's so good he said it twice.

Yeah, I said they hadn't figured it out, but generally I agree with you that they know, they're just willing to ignore me for $0.003

I'm curious, if you're mostly looking for a wikipedia page, why aren't you using wikipedia's search feature?

I always just new tab -> type. Navigating to wikipedia first is a drag.

I suggest that you change your browser’s default search engine to be Wikipedia.

Ooh, I like this idea. Do you do this? How's your experience so far?

No, I’ve turned off the search functionality of the address bar. Whan I want to search, I use a bookmark to go to a search site, and use that.

Multiple reasons:

1. I don't necessarily know I'm looking for a wikipedia page. For example it turns out there's a Bogart-Bacall syndrome -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogart%E2%80%93Bacall_syndrome -- that would actually be a false positive, but it's definitely not the first time I've found there are interesting wikipedia pages related to the thing I'm searching for.

2. In general, wikipedia's search is worse than google's -- meaning that if I don't know the exact name of the relevant topic, a google search for <topic> "wikipedia" is more likely to hit the right page than a search in wikipedia itself.

3. Opening wikipedia first is more work than typing bogart bacall wikipedia in by browser's search bar.

Trakt.tv is a good alternative to IMDb btw

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