Why does it need to be that extensive? I think that it might be more useful to keep very specific information walled off from general information. I think finding information would be too noisy otherwise. For instance, if I'm searching for ash on wikipedia I probably want wood or volcanic ash. But if I'm searching for ash on a pokemon wikipedia I want info on the main character.
Getting good search results is definitely a problem that a ton of people have spent time working on. But I don't really think that it is that important of a problem in some cases. Sure, it might be nice if wikipedia could accurately distinguish whether I wanted info on wood ash or Ash the fictional character, but that creates problems. It basically makes implicit assumptions about what I am interested in. And sometimes it can be nice to have less intelligent results.
> I think that it might be more useful to keep very specific information walled off from general information.
That is why wikipedia has a piece of text saying something along the lines of "This page only covers Foo, for any other usage of Foo see: Foo (Disambiguation)".
> For instance, if I'm searching for ash on wikipedia I probably want wood or volcanic ash. But if I'm searching for ash on a pokemon wikipedia I want info on the main character.
One of the things that is nice about using Duckduckgo in conjunction, is that you can use the `!w` bang, and do something like `!w Ash (Name)` and Wikipedia's naming is usually predicable enough to get to the right article first time.
Getting good search results is definitely a problem that a ton of people have spent time working on. But I don't really think that it is that important of a problem in some cases. Sure, it might be nice if wikipedia could accurately distinguish whether I wanted info on wood ash or Ash the fictional character, but that creates problems. It basically makes implicit assumptions about what I am interested in. And sometimes it can be nice to have less intelligent results.