Proposal talk:Wikipedia is a Web search engine

Wikipedia is not a search engine, it's an encyclopedia. While it might look like a search engine to the uninformed, Wikipedia is a convienent and free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. More people have been going here through search engines but that's because Wikipedia is becoming a really popular encyclopedia. Sure Wikipedia needs to remove some of its limitations and fight censorship a bit more than it has done in the past, but people should not have to confuse this encyclopedia with a search engine like Yahoo and Google. GVnayR 16:43, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, wikipedia is meant to be an encyclopedia. It is debatable how many pages actually fulfil that ambition. Many pages are database entries (only), while others are filled with personal views, etc. - Brya 07:26, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Fortunately other search engines frequently prioritise Wikipedia artciels in their search results. Perhaps that is why it is seen by some as a budding search engine.

In my opinion, though, it is far more important to develop search features which can help with the identification of reliable search results (i.e. getting rid of spam, advertising, propaganda, etc,) in order to safeguard the expansion of educational resources, including Wikipedia, in the future.Ipigott 19:57, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

The reason that Wikipedia has priority by the major search engines is that it's the sixth most popular website in the world. It took almost 10 years to get that far and now there is a Google-Wikipedia alliance that will allow people to only look up two web sites to get their research done for their high school or university-level courses.

By calling Wikipedia a search engine, we might just as well rename the site Wikisearchengine istead. The pedia suffix of Wikipedia means it's an encyclopedia, not a search engine. GVnayR 16:33, 3 October 2009 (UTC)