Yahoo! Search Blog: What is the capital of Guatemala?

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April 07, 2005

What is the capital of Guatemala?

When the French Yahoo! Search team goes to lunch, we often have lengthy discussions about the precise meaning of a word, we often guess the name of the capital of a faraway country, and we often take bets about the exact date of some historic event. As soon as we come back to work, one of us types a query in Yahoo! Search and then e-mails the exact answer to everybody. Indeed, Yahoo! Search has become our encyclopedia of choice: we can use it to find the answer to most factual questions, and most of the time the answer is right on the results page, in the few snippets that the engine chooses to display.

That brings us to our second-favourite lunch-time activity: playing the "Wouldn't it be cool if..." game. That's when we dream up all the cool features we could add to the search engine to make everyone's life easier. One day, after arguing about some geographical detail, Caroline, our search content producer for France, suggested that we could use the Yahoo! Search shortcuts to display directly the answers to geographical questions. We then asked ourselves: "Wouldn't it be cool if we showed country summaries from Wikipedia with a link to the full entry?". That day, we e-mailed Florence Devouard from the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees that we knew from the French wikisphere to check that she would find it as cool as we thought. She did, so we went ahead, downloaded the data, created some mock-ups and quickly secured internal support for our lunch-break project. Today we are launching our Wikimedia shortcuts in France, and they'll be on many more Yahoo! sites soon.

Try it yourself.

That's what we love about working at Yahoo!: anyone can come up with a cool idea and has the power to make them happen.

Stï¿½phane Gigandet
Yahoo! International Search Engineering

and

Caroline Constantin
Yahoo! Search France

P.S. Jimmy Wales, president of the Wikimedia Foundation, has written a guest blog post about this as well.

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Comments

A very nice feature, and I wish Yahoo will collaborate more and more with the open source community. Congrats !

Posted by: Sebastien Billard | April 7, 2005 04:38 AM

I am delighted to see we made it :-)

I think it was in august or september 2004 that I met Stephane on craowiki (http://wiki.crao.net/) when trying to look for a blog. And october since Stephane first mentionned the shortcuts launched today. I thought the idea was great and after I checked licence compatibilities, Stephane and Caroline went ahead !

The shortcuts are doubly cool to me. First they are cool because they will enhance the information service provided to readers. The information will not be offered only in english language, but also in languages spoken and read in countries which are usually not the first to benefit from such initiatives. Wikipedia is an international project which seeks to reach out for readers in many languages. However, it is a fact that some languages are more developped than others, and providing such tools will help increase visibility and we hope participation to inhabitants of South American for example.

Second, the shortcuts are cool as it does not seem so frequent initiatives come from non english people on the internet in international groups. It is usually only an issue of communication. Wikipedia is similarly very often perceived as an english project, essentially because most communication, internally and externally, is done in english. However, wikipedians come from all over the world and are involved locally as well as globally. And they all have the power to participate to our common dream, free knowledge for the largest number of people on Earth. Initiatives may come from any of them.

"That's what we love about working at Yahoo!: anyone can come up with a cool idea and has the power to make them happen."

I could not say it better :-)

Thanks to you for making it happen.

Anthere / Florence Devouard

Posted by: Anthere | April 7, 2005 05:53 AM

Nice, will be the first time that we, the French, actually discover something before anyone else cool :)
Now I believe you guys plan to widen the search result among the Wikipedia right? Also it would be nice to implement cities along the countries :)
Keep up the good work !!!

Posted by: Guillaume | April 7, 2005 05:56 AM

Bravo Florence et Stéphane. Content de pouvoir voir que Craowiki puisse produire du sens en LangueFrançaise ! Vivement les tests de cartographie sur la constitution européenne. Faut-t'il traduire cet article :-)

Posted by: Christophe Ducamp | April 7, 2005 09:05 AM

Le communiqué de presse Yahoo France Wikimedia Foundation is visible au lien suivant :

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/La_Foundation_Wikimedia_annonce_le_support_de_Yahoo

Posted by: Anthere | April 7, 2005 10:29 AM

C'est une bonne idée. D'autre fois j'ai du faire des recherches pour les factbooks tel celui de la CIA, la c'est plus rapide donc c'est mieux.

Le moins y'as de clicks y'as a faire le mieux c'est pour tout les utulisateurs.

Posted by: Richard | April 7, 2005 10:47 AM

ANSWER: en anglais: ytic alametaug
vive la france!

Posted by: anonymous | April 7, 2005 11:06 AM

Super. Un grand pas en avant. ;D

Posted by: Alvaro | April 7, 2005 04:09 PM

I like that the wikipedia article is the third result anyway.