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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.
...which sounded delicious.
"Do No Evil" became "Be as corrupt and evil as possible."
An "editable search engine"? Great, now even MORE of the searches I run will pop up ads for v14GR4 and enhancements for body parts I don't possess, nevermind those linkspam sites that just insert the entire fucking dictionary in metacode.
You searched for: Bill Gates
you got: 400 pictures of penises, vaginas, and one picture of a penis covered in something that looks like it came out of the OTHER opening.
Just imagine what all those malcontents out there with too much time on their hands will do with this! It could be truly amusing.
Not *everything* works best when edited by the hordes.
Wikia is not the "company" behind Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation, is what's behind Wikipedia. Wikia is a totally separate for-profit company that is run by Jimbo Wales.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Wikia, the company behind wikipedia reveal plans for a new, editable search engine. They say that the goal of the project is to get 5% of the search market.
According to Wikipedia, that goal of 5% will triple in the next six months.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Now I search and my results are:
"Tom is a FAG"
"Bilbo Lives!"
"Search engine optimization: do it the Wiki way"
"In the year 1432, the United States of America was founded by Bill Gates and his horde of windows-operating-system killbots..."
The thing that really rocks about Wikipedia's search is the Disambiguation function. Even Google does not have something like this.
They might not realize it, but they already have 50 percent of the search market. At least 50 percent of the "Intelligentsia" search market.
Fifty percent of the stuff I used to "look up" through a google search - I now get through wikipedia. You just have to be smart enough to know that the info you are looking for is most likely in wikipedia. And it most often is. Especially since wikipedia is so open - they've got articles for tons and tons of things that no mainstream encyclopedia would ever touch. I no longer use "fan sites" or "episode guide companies" for the episode guides of TV Series, they're all in wikipedia, and the layout and presentation is even better.
...at least it would get corrected. ;)
Chu vi parolas Vikipedion?
Problem is this will require a small band of fanatics to do the editing. Now for the "central/core-cultural" stuff that you might expect in an encyclopedia this model may work but web searches are probably more long tail/niche. Not sure that the editing group could ever be representative. Furthermore the risk of bias on small sample size gets even larger. Some of the bias mightn't even be conscious: e.g. exhibiting a preference for a rigourous page over a "dummies guide" (which might be more popular/widely useful).
Much better would be a behaviour based search engine that inferred when users were un/happy with results- e.g. user doesn't come back for more searches or click more links on existing return.Also even say if a user does a "poor" search firstly & then uses "clearer" terms then engine ought in future suggest the "clearer" terms as alt search or even return some of the results. Indeed even better the engine might "cluster" you with other similar users & retunr more relavant results (e.g. effectively inferring that you prefer rigourous complete guides rather than dummies intros).
This would be simpler & actually rely on the wisdom of masses rather than some central command editors, in fact this type of thinking was behind PageRank.