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Dec. 25, 2006 at 8:56am Eastern by Barry Schwartz
Wikipedia Founder To Launch Wikiasari Search Engine Early 2007
Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google by The Times unveils a new search engine named Wikiasari. The new search engine has investment backing from Amazon and others of over $4 million in capital. The "exclusive screen capture" Techcrunch has nothing to do with this new engine, according to the Wikia group. But this search engine seems to be based on community involvement. With a provisional launch in the first quarter of 2007, it will be interesting to see how quickly a search engine with real community trust evolves.
What makes this engine different?
“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,� Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,� he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.�
I covered the search community's thoughts on this at the Search Engine Roundtable and most if not all, are not all that impressed. Li Evans has a nice write up on Wikiasari Mania - The Facts, The Myths & Hysteria!.
I am sure Danny will chime in on this, telling us all the different engines that tried to add the human element when he gets back. I just wanted to post a short on this for future reference.
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By Barry Schwartz
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Search engines currently have the ability to observe what visitors do on their site, what they click, how long they spend before backbuttoning...
I like the concept behind this idea but let's say that this new search engine is strongly embraced by the current folks who love wikipedia... that is not, in my opinion, a good cross-section of web users and therefore the results would be strongly biased towards a certain type of person.
The "flavor" of this type of search engine would be strongly determined by its roots and its exposure - much as the major search engines yield different results based upon their algo - which again are flavored by the ideas of the people who design them.
So, we could end up with algo flavors such as "link pop", "trust juice" and "page content".... and community flavors such as "erudite", "geek", "liberal", "hillbilly" and "righteous".
Some folks might really like these community flavors. I might use them myself when I want reinforcement or a good chuckle. But where do I go when I want unbiased and accurate?