I use Wikipedia almost daily, but today this dialog box struck a nerve:

Search? Go? What’s the difference? Why would they make such a simple task so confusing, especially on a site that is otherwise very user-friendly?

Curiosity about such things being part of my job, I tried “Searching” for a term (“latte”) versus “Going” for it (which, of course, makes me think more about going for a latte than working on usability issues).

Turns out that “Go” produces the wikipedia entry (if any) with the same name as the search word, while “Search” produces a result set of all wikipedia entries containing that word.

On the German site it’s much clearer: “Artikel” vs. “Suche.” Certainly the English language is also flexible enough to offer a choice more specific than “Go”!