Why Doesn’t Google Buy Wikipedia?

How come Google hasn’t bought Wikipedia yet? Google usually buys technology over traffic (although with youtube that’s changing), and Wikipedia fits well being the first to do wiki.

Not only that, but Google heavily favors wikipedia results at the top of their own search results, and references it often. Even some internal documents and contract employee instructions reference wikipedia in some cases.

With a significant portion of their rankings based on Wikipedia, would it make sense for Google to just purchase it? Or does having it remain an independant 3rd party help Google remain unbiased* and credible?

* – some would argue that automatically ranking Wikipedia results high introduces another type of bias.

2 comments January 30th, 2007