User:AaronPeterson/Tolls for searching

background

Today, August 31st 2004, I noticed that the search feature was turned off on meta.mediawiki.org for performance reasons.

I would have payed a few cents to do searches on this website. Actually, I'm trying to be a bit of a volunteer and do work for this website, so I already feel like I'm giving to the community... However, i definitely get back a lot from the community, especially when they accept my work.

For things like complete database downloads, people should either user bittorrent type programs, or perhaps pay for it! A gig of bandwidth isn't super cheap!

at least a nice paypall donation request, with a notice of how much it costs to upload a gig, could be tacked on.

Harsh Reality

Making the information is not hard!! FINDING the information is hard, the future of the information technology is dependant on working search functions... We shall be at the mercy of our search engines, as they do not do an exhaustive search, they just find the "best" results. and could be tweaked to omit certain data. Certain IMPORTANT data.

The tolls for searching is a bad idea, and a good idea at the same time. I don't think the gnu documentation licence deals with the searchability of the data... however, we should have a licence that keeps searching free for this content, as the content, hate to say it, is a commodity. Searching MediaWiki is the future.

Should or Shouldn't charge for search

Probably shouldn't charge for search, but could just remind the users that it is a costly feature User reminders

todo

there are a few categories that this would fit into