Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Wikia Search Engine to be Launched on January 7th

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wisdom-of-crowds dept.

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."

5 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Easily Abused? by jrothwell97 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Point well made - while spam attacks may be pretty obvious, they could be spread out over time to make them less obvious.

    Additionally, I can see this search engine being very much affected by public mood. For example, say there was a royal death and a certain right-wing 'upmarket' tabloid newspaper decided to claim that it was a conspiracy by the Government to kill the royal off. This is linked to from said newspaper's web site, and this people improve its ranking. Therefore it floats to the top of the results pile, thus giving it more exposure and setting off a vicious cycle.

    Just a hypothetical situation, but certainly possible. Such a model would also make it possible to carry out smear attacks and to ruin the rankings of competing companies, parties, organisations, whatever - a practice that IMHO should be left to search engine admins.

    --
    Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
  2. Re:first things first by Odiumjunkie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I completely agree. I am continually amazed at how good google's input-correction is - if I do a search for 'pale gire', it knows to correct it to 'pale fire ', yet if I do a search for 'canadian gire', it's clever enough to work out that I mean 'canadian tire '. I'm also continually amazed that people running other search services haven't yet realised just how vital this feature is - it's probably one of my favourite things about Google. Less so for monosyllables, but it's useful for words like "monosyllables". I'm particulary surprised that prominent online dictionaries don't have similar funcionality, seeing as I would imagine a large portion of their usage is to find the correct spelling of words.

  3. Re:Challenging Google? by ThreeGigs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It looks like you've entered some sort of partnership with Grub http://www.grub.org/.
    If so, kudos... Grub's been languishing in not-ready-for-primetime land for far too long, and the ability to crawl your own site to keep results current is a bonus, too.

  4. Mod Parent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As trollish as parent is perhaps, he is unfortunately speaking a trollish truth.

    Speaking explicitly as a reader of slashdot, with all the group-think biases a site like this introduces, wikipedia is floundering in a mire of their own arrogance, and the dissatisfaction with this needs to be heard.

  5. Re:Your track record says otherwise by jwales · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "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."

    Actually, no. Wikipedia can be criticized on a lot of grounds, some of them even valid :-); but that it presents my personal-world view or that we exclude people outside a narrow political agenda is just... not grounded in fact.

    Perhaps you'd like to come to my talk page at Wikipedia and tell me what you're upset about.

    --
    Wikia