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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 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.
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
by our tags, that we have a few Wikipedian Protestors in our midsts.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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
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
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.
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.
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.
I foresee someone hacking this system to return goatse as the #1 result for every search made.
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.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
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.
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