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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."

50 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Challenging Google? by sykopomp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I guess that's their response to Google's Knol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol) Pity to see things heat up between the 'good guys'.

    1. Re:Challenging Google? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What? Why? It's called "competition" and it's healthy.

    2. Re:Challenging Google? by jwales · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, it is no response to Knol. I have been working on this for a year. The press has talked about it endlessly. :-)

      It'd be sort of cool if we could create a search engine in a week or two to respond to Knol, but actually it takes a bit longer. :)

      I see Larry and Sergei socially from time to time. I spoke about the search project at Google Zeigeist a few months ago. Going to a google party next month. The media loves a "fight" but really, that's just a nice story arc the press makes up. (Notice: google is not in the search business, google is in the advertising matching business. This search engine doesn't hurt that business at all, indeed it probably makes it marginally less likely we will see the emergence of a proprietary competitor to topple them.)

      It is actually possible for people to just enjoy doing cool stuff without being bastards about it. People forget this sometimes, maybe due to the reputation of a certain dominant software provider. :)

      --
      Wikia
    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. Re:Challenging Google? by R2.0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Hey Jimmy: quit goofing around on Slashdot and get to straightening out the Wikipedia "administration" system. Check out your current fundraising campaign - that little green guy is moving REALLY slowly, and things like faked credentials for editors and the "notability purge" aren't helping.

      Sincerely,
      The Rest of the Internet

      --
      "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
    5. Re:Challenging Google? by STrinity · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, it is no response to Knol. I have been working on this for a year.
      I'm sorry, but your post cites primary sources and thus does not meet Wikipedia's standards.
      --
      Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
    6. Re:Challenging Google? by mblase · · Score: 4, Funny

      It is actually possible for people to just enjoy doing cool stuff without being bastards about it. People forget this sometimes, maybe due to the reputation of a certain dominant software provider. :)

      Oh, come on. The people who matter already know that most Linux users aren't elitist snobs.

  2. Easily Abused? by Shade+of+Pyrrhus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Easily Abused? by Walzmyn · · Score: 5, Funny

      What this means is that no matter what you search for, the top hundred results will be to porn sites.

    2. 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.
    3. Re:Easily Abused? by Shade+of+Pyrrhus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Easily Abused? by Kjella · · Score: 2, Interesting

      it's completely at the whims of whoever created it and that's the problem. Funny, I prefer it to be under control of someone that's in the business of making good search results rathar than a bunch of wankers/trolls/bots trying to lure me to their site even though there's a hundred others that would be more relevant to my search.
      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. Re:Easily Abused? by jwales · · Score: 5, Informative
      The question of abuse is obviously one that we are taking very seriously in thinking about design issues. My belief is that the key to solving this thorny question is hinted at by the success of wikis and the wiki model: the key is to put tools in the hands of the community that allow for broad oversight and control by the community in a process of open dialogue and discussion. This is very different from approaches that allow only for atomistic participation by a "community" which is never allowed to really become a community due to excessive reliance on algorithmic voting systems and similar.

      One of the first lines of defense in the early days will be use of a community (wiki) generated whitelist of sites to crawl. We will want to work outward from there, but basically the first thing is for us to assess "look, what are the most important must-have sites on the net" and crawl them. One thing that the mainstream media never seems to report very well, mostly because I think they don't get why it is important, is that we are doing everything here under free licenses. The software GPL, the data we generate under free licenses, etc. The aim here is not just to create a good search engine, but to create it and *give it all away* in a way that I think has a chance to restructure the entire search industry. Well, maybe not, maybe so, but what the hell, it'll be fun to see. :-)

      --
      Wikia
    6. Re:Easily Abused? by nacturation · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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. And when you think about it, Google's pagerank algorithm already returns search results based on what the community thinks. This new venture is simply a means to take other peoples' sweat equity and turn it into profit for good old Jimmy while giving the people who did all the work little more than warm fuzzies inside, if that.
      --
      Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
    7. Re:Easily Abused? by ivan256 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    8. Re:Easily Abused? by timothy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hey, what would you say to another Slashdot interview so you could answer more questions at greater leisure? :)

      timothy

      --
      jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
    9. Re:Easily Abused? by jacquesm · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Abuse potential is the first entry on they whiteboard when it comes to designing a new internet site these days. It's a pity, but that's the way it is.

      I've been running a (small, nothing compared to what you're doing) community powered search engine for a while now (little less than one year), it's been a neat little project and I've learned a lot.

      I think the combined power of having your name and wikipedia as a launchpad and quite probably the capital to see this through may give you a chance worth taking. That said I wished that you'd go back to fixing what's still broken in wikipedia and that google would fix their search, I think you'd both be in better shape then. Wikipedia gives me a strong feeling the inmates have taken over the asylum and google has some serious issues (that your effort will probably not be able to address).

      best regards, & best of luck,

        Jacques Mattheij

      --
      MP3 Search Engine
    10. Re:Easily Abused? by martin-boundary · · Score: 2, Funny

      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.
      Oh yeah. Let's give the highly underpaid, highly overworked admins yet more unrelated tasks to carry out! Can't you people do your own company smear attacks? Why do you want to bother the admins with that? Besides, smearing competitors is technically new content, and content creation is not done in the server room. It just overheats the computers and there's no space to put another air conditioner anyway. Try the art department, but tell them to keep the picture sizes down this time!
  3. yeah by User+956 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    Not only that, Wikipedia is reporting that its marketshare has tripled in the last six months.

    --
    The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
  4. I don't care how they arrive at a rank! by garcia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. My prediction: killed by nonprofit competition by Bombula · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Since this project would seem to depend on the participation and good-will of users in order to work, my guess is that a nonprofit version will follow shortly afterwards, paralleling the open-source model. I also predict that without the benefit of a massive Microsoft-esque head start, the for-profit version will be put of business in short order.

    --
    A-Bomb
    1. Re:My prediction: killed by nonprofit competition by pigiron · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The non-profit is still going to have to make money. Crawling the web and returning results to queries is quite hardware and energy intensive.

  6. first things first by Paktu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:first things first by phantomlord · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
    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:first things first by Baricom · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Google's mentioned a variety of techniques publicly, although there's sure to be some secret sauce as well. The most obvious check would be a dictionary-based spellchecker. They can also look for letter transpositions, misstruck keys, word-form matching, etc.

      They also do a variety of statistical analysis on a ridiculously large data set. For example, if a particular phrase appears over and over again, and all of the words in the query match the phrase save one, it may be more likely that the non-matching word is incorrect.

      Google often (always?) tracks click-throughs on search pages, so it would be able to deduce the accuracy of its suggestion by seeing if a user clicks-through to a given result, and doesn't come back to the search results. Also, Google does correlation between different terms that often appear frequently together.

      It's amazing what kind of stats you can do with a workforce full of Ph.D.s and half a million servers :)

  7. What a joke... by Evil+Kerek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:What a joke... by jwales · · Score: 5, Informative

      Again, it would be hard for this to be a response to Knol, since I announced it and have been working on it for a year. :-)

      And, if you read the linked article, you would know that *zero* donations from Wikipedia have anything at all to do with this: Wikia is a completely separate organization.

      Also don't make the classic mistake of thinking that "open source" automatically means "volunteer coders". It generally does not, and the classic FUD from the proprietary world fails to describe reality for precisely this reason.

      And finally, one of the most important concepts here is that of a broad deep whitelist, which is something that I think can be done realiably and well with appropriate tools in the hands of the end users. The entire problem of bot-driven spam comes from a lack of reliable quantities of human oversight in the process. All you have to do to massively spam google is fool a computer. (Well, even then, google does a pretty damned good job of preventing massive spam though of course there are always some problems.) Pretty hard to get that nonsense by a properly organized community effort.

      (But of course, the design of a community which can move things forward quickly without a lot of useless work is nontrivial.)

      --
      Wikia
    2. Re:What a joke... by ToiletDuck · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Wikia is a completely separate organization. Why aren't links to Wikia nofollowed like every other external link posted on Wikipedia, then?

      It seems odd to me that a completely separate organization would get this very special treatment. This ensures Wikia gets higher search engine rankings, and by extension more exposure and ad revenue.

      What is your explanation for this?
    3. Re:What a joke... by jwales · · Score: 2, Interesting

      My response? That you are misleading people.

      There are a huge number of sites in the interwiki linnk map:
      http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map

      Including for example, uhm, slashdot. And Citizendium. And Merriam-Webster.

      And finally, I have nothing to do with the list. I've never edited it, never asked anyone to edit it, and I have no input into what goes on it.

      I am sure you will apologize for spreading this information. Right?

      --
      Wikia
  8. I can see... by Idiot+with+a+gun · · Score: 3, Funny

    by our tags, that we have a few Wikipedian Protestors in our midsts.

  9. Market share of... by gringer · · Score: 4, Funny

    Market share of what? Wikiality
    --
    Ask me about repetitive DNA
    1. Re:Market share of... by CCFreak2K · · Score: 3, Funny

      [[citation needed]]

      --
      "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
  10. Well that's lame. by raehl · · Score: 3, Funny

    the top hundred results will be to porn sites.

    What a crappy search engine. When I search for something, I want the top 100 results to be 100 different porn sites! I can find two porn sites without help.

    --
    paintball
  11. Hope it works better than wikipedia's search by SoCalChris · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. Your track record says otherwise by onyxruby · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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....

    1. 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
    2. Re:Your track record says otherwise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Your track record says otherwise by mdwh2 · · Score: 2, Informative

      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?

      No - he said his talk page, not his Wikipedia article.

  13. Re:Challenging Google's Revenue Model by TaoPhoenix · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There have only been two fundamental revenue models of content for 25 years now - EndUser and Advertiser. The ISP's went through the throes of the switch from PerHour to FlatRate in the 1990's, and the RIAA is struggling with it now.

    I don't know anyone who would "pay to search" casual queries. There are some professional databases which do operate on this principle for high powered content.

    From the RIAA threads we learn people don't want to pay as endusers for their content. The post above asks about the advertiser model.

    The absolutely tough part about Free Open Source models is that it takes a MUCH longer cycle for the benefits to wind around the social benefit cycle. The monthly rent/mortgage whips around much sooner. The first person to absolutely nail this problem will be the mogul of the 2010 decade.

    --
    My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
  14. Wikia, the place to go for furry fan fiction by Animats · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  15. 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.

  16. The problem here is... by Stan+Vassilev · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wikipedia receives most of its traffic from its articles appearing in Google's search results, Wikipedia being relevant content, and Google being the top search engine.

    How is Wikipedia to draw traffic to their search engine? Obviously not via Google, as search engines are content free on their own. Integrating it with Wikipedia? But again, Wikipedia is the end target, not a start point, so how could this work.

    I don't think Wikipedia has the strategy or money for this to reach critical mass and show its potential, but it'll be interesting as an experiment.

  17. Re:Search Engine based in Wiki? by Donniedarkness · · Score: 2, Funny
    "Interesting that the internet is also populated by the more educated and affluent of our society."

    And Furries.

    --
    Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
  18. Scary Implications by Doomstalk · · Score: 3, Funny

    I foresee someone hacking this system to return goatse as the #1 result for every search made.

  19. Re:Challenging Google's Revenue Model by sethawoolley · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  20. Re:Sooo.... by jwales · · Score: 4, Informative

    Completely different. :) For one thing, we are doing everything completely freely licensed. Mahalo is proprietary.

    For another thing, Mahalo is "human edited" search results for the top queries, which is not a bad idea of course, but it is not intended to be a full search engine. Mahalo have indicated an interest in replacing their google search backup with our open source alternative, if we get to be good enough, which is obviously a far from foregone conclusion.

    --
    Wikia
  21. One-Upping the Least Bad by SpaceToast · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Funny to read this today, after I spent a couple of hours yesterday searching Google for something that doesn't exist -- a Plucker type app for the iPod Classic. What struck me was just how badly Google performed. Any search containing the word "iPod" seems to return pages upon pages of blog entries about the (long since released) iPhone. What one tends to find with a Google search are a lot of loud, content-light blog entries, popping with ads, with short dashed-off articles broken across several pages. "Relevance" in Google seems to have the most to do with activity -- posts per day per site, repeated introductory blurbs on every page, modestly-trafficed forums devoid of meaningful discussion. Google does a pretty decent job with common searches, reasonably well with obscure searches, but very badly with the rest -- the middle of the long tail.

    Google rose to prominence by being the best of a pretty weak set of players. It's still only the least bad solution, and there are a lot of things it does poorly. In classic AltaVista, you could type a few words of a song in quotes and find the title and lyrics. Type a long quoted string into Google, and you're likely to come up with nothing.

    If Wikia manages to best Google in any type of search I'll applaud it. Search choices beyond Google and Trying to Be Google would be most welcome.

  22. We already have this? by cavebison · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If we're talking about publicly-ranked search results, the results may expose more than we're comfortable with.

    Wikipedia content is either right or wrong. It's not meant to be subjective, hence it can be patrolled and corrected. Now they want to apply it to subjective content; I don't see that making sense, albeit at first glance. User A is a technocrat who loves Monty Python. Hardly an isolated case. Use B is a 15yr old who likes whatever he/she likes this week. There's no "patrolling" this, except to address systematic abuse.

    The concept is fine for slashdot, or any "closed" system, where the users generally share a common set of expectations. At /., I find all +5 content to be generally insightful, interesting, funny, etc. At least it seems so to me. Either I'm new here, or we've all seen Life of Brian. Whether that's utopia or not is another question altogether.

    Expand this out to the general internet user, and the result will, of course, reflect the general focus of human society. That will be interesting, to say the least, though I'll bet $5 that anything entertainment- and religion-based will always be at the top of the results. Is that what people want? Ipso facto perhaps, but sure as hell not I.

    Let's keep in mind that (no offence to anyone specific) ~80% of Americans believe in God, less than 50% subscribe to Darwin, ~30% believe in "UFOs, witches and astrology" (if you can believe this poll that is). Of course, smart people believe weird things too.

    Add to this, that 81% of those who have seen two or more "Police Academy" movies believe that O.J. is innocent, and you have a recipe for disaster.

  23. Compete with Google and Yahoo? When pigs fly! by jddunlap · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's easier to find things on Wikipedia with Google than it is with the Wikipedia search... Good luck, Jimmy Wales. You're going to need it.