Technology Wikipedia Creates a Search Engine

[Sir Gordon]

Reports have said that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is planning to launch a new search engine next year, to be called Wikiasari.

He’s clearly aiming to rival Google. He says:

“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…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.’ 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. 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.”

The new company will be the third business division of Wikia, the for profit company that Wales founded in 2005 and is now led by CEO Gil Penchina. The other two business units are the main Wikia wiki site itself, and the recently launched OpenServing product.

Wikia has raised over $4 million in capital, including a recent round by Amazon.

Despite the fact that the original article reported that Amazon is involved in the project, Wikia is making it clear on the site that they are not invovled in any way (other than as a shareholder of Wikia).

Wikia To Launch Search Engine: Exclusive Screenshot | TechCrunch

Update 12/25/06: Jimmy Wales says this isn't a Wikiasari screen shot. So what is it? The Times reported earlier today that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

techcrunch.com

 

[TheDamien]

Sounds interesting, but will it work?

 

[SFilip]

> but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap.
Most of the time this is because people aren't using the right keywords. So far Google found everything I ever needed (including this site) with rare exceptions. But in these exceptional cases I really doubt a community of (random) people would be of much assistance.
So pretty much another case of "don't fix what isn't broken".
Then again who knows...perhaps this will work after all. But if they expect it to be as reliable as wikipedia is then forget it.
Besides I bet that Google will come up with something similar (if not better) next year as well.

 

[Sir Gordon]

>but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap.
...that was a quote.

I bet the Wikipedia owner only told this to encourage his audience