Wikipedia Founder Working on User-Powered Search

An anonymous reader writes "Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikia corporation, has revealed plans to offer a user-driven search engine. Ars Technica reports that the plan is to leverage user preferences to pick the 'best' site for any given search term, while at the same time utilizing advertising for commercial gain. The article admits this may not be the ideal solution: 'Users may be reluctant to contribute to the betterment of a commercial site that may end up being bought by a bigger company. Consider, for example, the tragic death of TV Tome, a comprehensive community-driven television content guide that was eventually bought by CNET and transformed into a garish, excessively commercialized Web 2.0 monstrosity of significantly less value to users.' Just the same, Wales seems very enthusiastic in the Times Online article highlighting this venture."

Comments

Been there, done that...

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Back in 1999 a company called Direct Hit Technologies developed what they coined a "popularity engine" that ranked results based on tracking user behavior. They basically partnered with existing search engines and mined their web logs looking for patterns among users. If a lot of people who entered search term "A" went to website "X" but within a minute or two went to website "Y" then "Y" would be ranked higher than "X". Direct Hit was bought in the middle of the internet boom by Ask Jeeves for a cool $512 million. Some of that technology likely still exists within their full search engine, and I'm sure others like Google, Yahoo, etc. all use similar methods of tracking user behavior for helping with their rankings.

Shills?

[Kjella]

And how would he handle shills? Bots? Trolls? Ok, google is struggling bad enough with link farms and the like but I can't really imagine end-users being the answer to this, even with some sort of meta-recommendation system. Personally, I find either a wikipedia search (for example now, recently I've been answering some christmas quizzes which it just excels at) or a very targeted google search (3-4 search terms) finds 99.9% of what I want, and the rest just isn't there.