Eileen Rodriguez, a Google spokeswoman, hardly quelled the speculation by explaining that the whole thing was really a learning opportunity for the company. Google " to learn more about the Internet's domain name system," she said recently in an e-mail message. "While we have no plans to register domains at this time, we believe this information can help us increase the quality of our search results.

Source: SearchGuild

According to , Google has made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects.

The terms of the offer are currently being discussed by the board. The developer committee has been informed of some of the details via email. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005.

Please note that this agreement does not mean there is any requirement for us to include advertising on the site.

More details will be put here when the offer is allowed to be made public.

About Wikimedia Hosting

At present all DB's, apaches and most Squids are hosted at the Florida data center used by Bomis.com (http://www.bomis.com) and they are donating rack space and half of the bandwidth costs. From the start of the project until September(?) 2004 they paid for all bandwidth.

Lost Oasis (http://www.lost-oasis.fr/) in France is providing hosting and bandwidth for the European Squid cache service using chloe, bleuenn and ennael. The machines are installed in the Lost Oasis data center in Aubervilliers near Paris and serve France, the UK and Benelux.

See also Wikimedia Hosting Partners

Via and Slashdot