Google has agreed to pay for ramped-up Wikipedia services, part of a growing trend for the US tech giant to strike commercial deals with other web companies.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the charity that oversees the online encyclopedia, said Google is the first paying customer for its commercial company Wikimedia Enterprise, which it launched last year.
The commercial services are offered free of charge to the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization that operates a website called the Wayback Machine, which stores snapshots of websites and is used to repair Wikipedia links.
“We are thrilled to be working with both of them as our long-term partners,” Lane Becker of Wikimedia said in a statement on Tuesday.
Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites in the world, is free to use, updated by volunteers, and relies on donations to stay afloat.
The new commercial entity will not change this regulation for individual users, the foundation said.
Google uses material from the site for its “Knowledge Panel” – a sidebar that accompanies the main search results.
The source of the information is not always indicated, a practice that has prompted complaints from Wikimedia.
The foundation said its new product gives customers a “feed of real-time content updates on Wikimedia projects” beyond what’s available to the public.
The product was “designed to make it easier for these entities to package and share Wikimedia content,” it said in a statement.
Google has previously given money to Wikipedia through donations and grants, but the new deal puts their relationship on a more formal commercial footing.
“We have long supported the Wikimedia Foundation in pursuit of our common goals of expanding knowledge and access to information for people around the world,” said Tim Palmer of Google.
The foundation’s statement did not reveal the value of the Google contract.
Google has long had a difficult relationship with other websites – it even tried to create a rival to Wikipedia called Knol, though the company failed.
But the company has changed course in recent years and is making more deals, especially with media companies.
French regulators and Google on Tuesday ended a years-long dispute by agreeing on a framework for the US firm to pay news outlets for content.
Google said it has already struck deals with hundreds of news outlets across Europe, including Agence France-Presse.
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