The search engine giant Yahoo Inc. (www.yahoo.com) announced on April 8 that it will supply hardware and other resources to the Wikipedia Foundation (www.wikipedia.org) to support that nonprofit organization's free Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Yahoo Search also will feature abstracts of Wikipedia content at the top of relevant search results in the form of shortcuts, which are either factual information or links to factual information. Yahoo Search plans to begin serving up shortcuts with Wikipedia content in the coming weeks on its US site and on other select country sites.
Yahoo's vice president of search content David Mandelbrot said that Yahoo's support comes completely free of charge to Wikipedia, that featuring Wikipedia's content abstracts and links in the form of shortcuts is in line with Yahoo Search's mission to provide high-quality, relevant information to its users, that to operate a site that reaches as many people as Wikipedia can be costly for a non profit, and that Yahoo is contributing with resources to help with that effort.
Wikipedia's president Jimmy Wales said that Wikipedia's growth in Web traffic continues to be staggering, doubling every few months, and that Yahoo's generous donation to Wikipedia's cause in the form of servers, hosting and bandwidth, will have a huge impact on Wikipedia's ability to get its message of sharing knowledge out to the world.
