Wikipedia's Search Engine Plan

jasonoik writes "Wikia, the commercial company founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, reveals plans for a new, editable search engine. They say that the goal of the project is to get 5% of the search market. The service does not yet an official release date. The article also leaves open the possibility that the search results may contain ads, and concludes by listing figures of the web advertisement market." Update: 03/11 17:24 GMT by KD : Wikia and Wikipedia are separate companies.

Comments

Wikipedia's search sucks ass!

[Weezul]

Maybe they're first project should be: make wikipedia's internal search work correctly! It can't even handle the most basic miss-spellings now.

If your serious about this, don't compete with google, instead partner with google and make a wiki.google.com provide google's own search results & ads, but filtered and processed in various ways, which are handled by the wiki.

For example, you want to give only unique sites/hits but this may depend upon the host's url.

Re:Wikipedia's search sucks ass!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Maybe they're first project should be: make wikipedia's internal search work correctly! It can't even handle the most basic miss-spellings now.

You know, I've never had problems with the wikipedia search engine. More often than not, I enter something I'm looking for and it finds the correct article 95% of the time, with the spelling corrected and the missing words inserted. Of course, I have a vague idea of how what I'm looking for is spelled in the first place, perhaps I'm helping the search engine, but really so far I'm really not disappointed with it.

At any rate, flip through a real paper encylopedia and you'll find the "search engine" (the thesaurus) to be a real pain compared to anything Wikipedia can come up with, therefore I guess for an encyclopedia, I'm happy enough with it.