In order to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information on its search engine, Google is reportedly going to pay for the services of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit group behind Wikipedia.
Launching from The Verge, the Wikimedia Foundation said Google is one of the companies that became the first customer for the Wikimedia Enterprise service.
Wikimedia Enterprise, which was just launched last year, allows users including Google to be able to access most of the information from Wikipedia more efficiently.
Instead of relying on free data dumps and publicly available APIs, Wikimedia Enterprise enables their customers to use APIs that are more suitable for recycling and releasing information at a larger scale.
This service also allows customers to make updates to the content they use, this helps to prevent outdated or inaccurate information from appearing in browsers outside of Wikidpeda.
Google uses the Wikimedia service in a number of ways. One of the most obvious is in the knowledge panel that appears on the side of the Google Search results page. It appears whenever a user searches for people, places or things in Google's large database.
Thus, Wikipedia is one of the sources that Google often uses to fill in the information contained in the panel. Google also cites Wikipedia in an information panel it adds to some YouTube videos to fight misinformation and conspiracy theories.
However, it is not yet clear how this new partnership between Google and the Wikimedia Foundation will work.
Google search partnership managing director, Tim Palmer only briefly said that Google hopes to deepen its partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation through the company's services. Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation still refuses to comment on the report on the partnership with Google.
Wikimedia Enterprise's senior director of revenue, Lane Becker, said the service was still in the early stages of the partnership and declined to be more specific.
Google has made donations to the Wikimedia Foundation before, but this marks the first time it's signed in as a real customer.
In addition to Google, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that the Internet Archive has also become a customer of the company despite not paying for the service.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that operates a website called the Wayback Machine.
The site works to archive screenshots of web pages that allow users to view deleted or changed information, as well as view layouts on old websites.