Last February (2005), Google made an offer to Wikimedia to host some of its projects on their servers. But soon, this news faded as nothing happened and all the speculations were put to rest. Now, some recent developments over this partnership are drawing some serious attention.

Over a year ago, Googlepedia.com offered to host some of Wikimedia's projects. Wikimedia has confirmed that discussions are on with Google but they wouldn't host advertisements.

There are some clear signs which support such fruitful developments. On, March 6th Google registered googlereference.net/org/info and googlereferencepages.com/net/org/info. Most probably, one of these is an encyclopedia. Now, whenever you think about any encyclopedia, very first name that comes in mind is Wikipedia. We can hope that this would be the next step towards building a tie between Google and Wikipedia.

Nothing is confirmed yet, so there is enough room for some other developments. This step might be taken in favor of companies which produce reference material for Google. If it is so, then these companies would be able to upload their information to Google hosted repository and could be located easily by the visitors. In future, these repositories could be converted to a consistent searchable format.