RSSWikipedia Looks to Conquer Search Next
By Ed Oswald | Published March 8, 2007, 12:53 PM
The company behind Wikipedia plans to shake up the search market by offering a collaborate search platform allowing users to improve upon the system much like they do with the popular encyclopedia Web site.
At a news conference Thursday in Tokyo, Wikipedia founder and chairman Jimmy Wales said Wikia -- the commercial face of Wikipedia -- plans to take as much as five percent of the search market.
Wales criticized search leaders Yahoo and Google for keeping their search technologies under wraps and not letting users have a say in the process. He claims that the constant improvement of the technology would also give it a leg up on the increasing problem of search result spam.
The software used by Wikipedia is made available freely to other sites as long as they provide a link back to the company, and Wikia could arguably be credited with spurring the explosion of the wiki as a Web-authoring medium.
If Wales is successful, the wiki-like search project could be serving about half the search queries of Microsoft's MSN and Windows Live, which accounts for 10 percent of the search market in most surveys.
"Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken," Wales says on a wiki devoted to the project. "It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that."
Wikipedia is an interesting concept.
It relies on the presumed good will/honesty of the people to enter info. For basic definitions it's pretty good. But when you want something more specific, all you get is off the wall ego oriented definitions, which in turn reveals a kind of marketing bashing between people/companies. That brings the question of Wikipedia credibility.
So, now they want to release a search engine. If they are a non-profit organization, how much money do they need to raise in order to hire a guru software engineer? What does Wales mean by "...letting users have a say..."? How much can you trust an anonymous user? If there are no rules, then the entire search engine industry would be filled with links for ultra-low moral and ethical web sites.
It would be interesting to see what Wikipedia wants to do with a search engine. In time we'll see their results.
I always give new technologies a chance to prove themselves, and if it doesn't work out then I simply don't use them.
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|Uh huh...and how much will their donation requirements go up?
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|I like the ideal, where is the white paper on this.
The way of "Open Source" and letting people have a say.
http://www.rmvb-converter.com/news
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|Great. More comment spam. I wouldn't mind an exception to the Geneva Convention for spammers.
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|rofl
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|I like the ideal, where is the white paper on this.
The way of "Open Source" and letting people have a say.
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|That would be a rel="nofollow" link I presume :-)
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