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."

Comments

Easily Abused?

[Shade of Pyrrhus]

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.

Re:Easily Abused?

[Shade of Pyrrhus]

Having an open algorithm is good, as non-disclosure isn't security, but the issue is allowing people to rank searches and such. Having that public is asking for people to abuse the system, and as noted before, a lof of malicious parties could seemingly legitimately rank their sites (porn sites, etc) higher, leading to ranking battles by bots. Of course, the issue of vandalism occurs with Wikipedia, however when people are looking to make money off of it they'll likely be more persistent.

Re:Easily Abused?

[ivan256]

Is there an intersection between the people who decide what goes on the whitelist, and what is "notable" for inclusion in Wikipedia?

I thought so. Your solution is already broken.

I don't care how they arrive at a rank!

[garcia]

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.

first things first

[Paktu]

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.

Re:first things first

[phantomlord]

Search for Kobar Towers and you get 0 relevant articles. Search for Khobar Towers and you get 62 articles. Yeah, the first is a misspelling, but it's 1 letter off, nothing difficult for a spell checker to check against a dictionary of existing articles. What use is a search engine if it is so strict that I have to enter the terms exactly to get an article when I could just do that in the URL?

As long as I need to use google to search Wikipedia, I don't see Wikipedia creating a google killer.

Hope it works better than wikipedia's search

[SoCalChris]

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.

Your track record says otherwise

[onyxruby]

Unfortunately for you your track record disagrees with your promises. You and your website have a history of abuse and bias that rivals that of any on the Internet. Your management incompetence of Wikipedia is so bad that you have dedicated websites documenting it. From secret mailing lists to the junior high style politics that rule your sham open organization, you are incompetent.

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....

Re:Your track record says otherwise

[Anonymous Coward]

Come to your wikipedia page?

you mean the one that you have been documented (and here) not only editing, but wiping clean the edit history on, trying to bury your tracks?

The game you're playing is dirty and how dare you come here unwilling to meet us on equal ground.

Re:Challenging Google's Revenue Model

[sethawoolley]

From the RIAA threads we learn people don't want to pay as endusers for their content. Great post, except this part doesn't make any sense. I pay as an end user for content all the time, and not just for high-end data: Magazine subscriptions, membership in various societies (and their publications), newspapers, my ISP, government funding (I pay through taxes), direct donations to non-profits, contributions to wikipedia and other open content systems directly. While some of them are for high-end data, a lot of it is not.

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.