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Wikipedia announces search engine plans
Author: Brett ThomasPublished: 12th March 2007
Jimmy Wales has come out and said it - There's nothing special about Google.
Largely, most users find one of the big three to be best for them - Google, Yahoo!, or MSN Live. Well, there may be a new one coming into town - Wikia, Inc. has announced its plans for a search engine.
For those of you who haven't really heard of Wikia, Inc., I can't really say I blame you. But it is exactly what its name comes closest to - it's the non-profit company that owns Wikipedia. What can Wikia bring new to the searching world? Well, the jury is still out on that - Wikia's founder, Jimmy Wales has gone on record saying there's really not much to searching.
"There's nothing special about the way Google or Yahoo! search web pages," Wales said in a recent interview. "The idea that Google has some edge because they've got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now." But even if Google still does have those rocket scientists, the plans for Wikia's engine are nowhere near something Google would do.
What Wales would like to bring to the party is a little more open-source knowhow, letting its users tweak the way the engine scans, sorts and filters. By making the search open-source, enthusiastic users can fix problems before they become exploited (like has happened in the past with every other search engine). The goal is to let humans do what algorithms cannot - correct, modify, and adapt to an ever-changing world wide web.
Along the way, it could completely remove the threat of "pay to play," where companies pay search engines to drop their names on the top of the relevance stack. Of course, that is a double-edged sword - a completely open-source engine means the possibility that companies could hire people to tweak the search in their favour, much like they pay people to build them Wiki entries. A screening process would need to be implemented, hopefully one run by a little better choice than Essjay.
Rumours of the upcoming site started to show up at the end of last year, but this is the first time that the site's founder has really begun a public push to get attention for it. Wales hopes that Wikia's search engine would ultimately capture more than 5% of the search market, though he didn't specify a timetable for when he'd like to see that happen. The new search engine will be unrelated to Wikipedia or any other project currently going on under Wikia's umbrella.
Do you have a thought on the new search? Let us hear about it in our forums.
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Comments (11)Stats: 0.124 seconds
5% that is a reasonable target, not overstepping themselves. I myself use Google, and absolutely hate Yahoo, gave up using it years ago, too much irrelevant stuff and way too cluttered.
Man i hate these NVA (no value added) websites
i think this is a good step.... open source for the win!!!!!
- Google has a bunch of extremely smart people who are actually willing to put in effort and build things. Wikipedia could hypothetically attract ten times the entire size of Google's staff, but how many of those people would have both the skills and dedication to do what Google's engineers do?
- Google has an extremely large cash pool. Yes, they may proudly flaunt their servers built from commodity parts, but there are a lot of those servers. Wikia Inc. will need to sink a lot of money into this engine to be competitive.
I don't mean to discourage anyone; an open source search engine is an excellent idea. I was just a little amused by Wales's comment. :)I always find that I get two "premium" ads at the top (like usual) then the manufacturers site or a review then a load of resellers.
It all depends on what has been indexed and what manufacturers allow to be reviewed.
Remember Google's page rank algorithm won't find a manufacturers site top of the pile unless it's been linked to.