Slashdot Mirror
Wikia Search Engine to be Launched on January 7th
cagnol writes "The Washington Post reports that Jimmy Wales, the founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has announced the launch of a new open-source search engine, Wikia Search, on January 7th, 2008. The project will allow the community to help rank search results, in a model close to Wikipedia. However the company is a for-profit organization. This new search is supposed to challenge Google and Yahoo."
So basically...they're asking for people to abuse the ranking system. To patrol something like this would require a company with resources like Google, and most likely the reason Google doesn't have such functionality. Just my two cents.
The idea is to challenge the established players by offering a search service that is more transparent to end users, meaning they can see how search results are arrived at. Wales has described Yahoo and Google as opaque services that don't explain how results are arrived at.
Personally, I don't care how search engines rank the websites they return as long as what is returned is proper, relevant and useful.
It would have been nice to see them fix Wikipedia's own search engine, which IMO is absolute garbage. I have a better chance of being linked to what I'm looking for by using a general search engine.
This is simply his response to Google starting what amounts to competition for wikpedia. I'm sure google is having quite the laugh from it - one wonders how much of the donations for wikpedia are being used towards this thing.
If you think wikpedia gets vandalized, wait until there's money involved. Wikpedia for all it's trappings, doesn't directly influence spam. But a search engine... IF, and this is a big IF, this thing becomes mainstream, having the code public will make it very easy for the bot herders to control it. The idea is simply flawed. Google is currently dealing with bot herders attempting to manipulate it's page ranks - while the idea of it being open source sounds great (well, ok it doesn't to me - I don't have the love affair with open source that most slashdotters do - I've never bought into the security myth that there's GOOD coders out there with so much free time on their hands that they are walking OTHER peoples code. I don't like doing that when I'm PAID to do it. Not too mention there just aren't that many good coders out there....but I digress) it's simply going to work right into the hands of the malware crowd - especially now that it's more organized crime than it is vandalism.
EK
Shouldn't they work on getting wikipedia's search to work half way decently before they try to compete with Google?
Don't get me wrong, I like wikipedia, but their search on the site is next to worthless.
The thought that Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia could have an open site without abuse is laughable. You operate under the sham of an open community, yet exclude those outside a very narrow political agenda. Your a fraud, using open source principals as a smokescreen that presents your personal world-view set as fact to the world. I don't buy what your selling, and I'm calling your bluff. The sad thing is that this will probably make you a fair amount of money if more people don't start to see through you.
But then the wonderful thing about leading revisionist history is you can substitute your own revisions for reality....
Wikia has been something of a dud. What Wikia really does is monetize fancruft. Their big wikis are for Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft], Everquest, Marvel comics, Yu-Gi-Oh, and similar subjects. They're the resting place for fan articles thrown out of Wikipedia.
Wikia's search engine, based on the user demographic they have now, is going to have great coverage of furry fan fiction.
There's already a good manually-updated search engine. It's called Open Directory. It's quite useful as a data source for answering the question "what is this web site about"? It tends to run months behind changes to the web, since it's manually updated. While not many people query DMOZ manually, it's used by Yahoo, Google, etc. to get some basic information about a web site.
As an example of how great Wikia search is going to be, Wales suggested searching for "Tampa hotels". The major search engines return too many bottom-feeder reseller and directory sites for searches like that. As I point out occasionally, we've already solved that problem over at SiteTruth, which looks for business legitimacy. Type in "Tampa hotels" there and watch it push the marginal sites to the bottom of the search results. We have that one handled.
Wikipedia works because people are willing to do substantial work for free for a non-profit organization. That doesn't work for a commercial business. You can get people to write about themselves (Myspace, Facebook, etc.) but beyond that, "crowdsourcing" doesn't go very far.
Is content going to ever be totally free? It will be if people understand the inherent rewards of an open society. Information's negligible cost of duplication is the revolutionary model is the thing that is shattering the old models (c.f. http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/EconomyOfIdeas.html). Wikipedia is already doing that. As much as I'm a critic of Jimmy Wales, citizendium, etc. (with their NPOV lunacy), the system he's helped build is saving people's lives and improving quality of life in ways the old world just doesn't understand yet.
Personally, I'm hopeful that as long as we still have the Right to Read (c.f. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html), we're on the path to freedom and salvation. A corporation who makes up a new "model" to take advantage of content producers isn't going to take hold anymore. There's just not a point anymore. The price of content is already quite low for common knowledge. Even if the arbiters of knowledge try to keep it from common knowledge, we can paraphrase it. The greatest risk to real productive use of our knowledge still remains Patents. Information may finally be free, but the freedom to tinker is not.