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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.
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.
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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
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....
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.
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