Wikia and Amazon to Create Search Engine
The Times Online is reporting the recent Wikia and Amazon partnership will result in a new search engine:
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!
Mr Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was launched in 2003.The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.
Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next year.
…
“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,” he said.
Spammers and commercial ventures are also learning how to manipulate Google’s computer-based search, he added.
Some initial thoughts:
- I’ve run into the same situation Wales describes in terms of “hotel” searches bringing up tons of agents and folks who have gamed the search engine algorithm for their top spots. They are not necessarily useless, but they very often have a low signal/noise ratio. But it’s not clear what should come up at the top instead. Spammers will certainly try to game the “human oriented” process Wikia puts into place, just like Wikipedia is facing a big spam problem. Will Wikia have the staff/community to combat this?
- Related to this, how will Wikia get a dedicated community to create better search results? Will a grassroots community help Wikia, a for profit company, further its mission and revenue generating activity? People are willing to contribute to Wikipedia because it is a nonprofit project, spreading knowledge and free (as in freedom) content. If you try to build the same around a for-profit activity, the dynamics are drastically different.
- It seems like rather than start from scratch with another search engine, a hybrid approach of using Google’s algorithmic search, plus the external links from Wikipedia, Wikitravel, etc. could be enough to “massage” the results to become more useful. The problem with depending purely on human-oriented processes for recommending links for a search engine result, is that humans might be good for the long-term horizon, but spidering the Internet gets the fastest changing information.
- The name is rather unwieldy. Wikiasari sounds like a plural of Wikisaurus, part of the nonprofit Wiktionary project. I predict lots of Wikisauri, Wikisari and Wikiasauri typos.
More related stories by IT Wire and UPI.
December 24th, 2006 10:40
[…] Wikisari: the new Google Rival on the Way Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is about to launch a search engine intended to rival to Google and Yahoo. Wikiasari, which uses the same user-generated system as Wikipedia, may launch as early as the first quarter of 2007. It will be a for-profit project launched by Jimmy’s company Wikia, making money from ads. “Wiki” as we all know by now, means “quick” in Hawaiian;“asari” means “rummaging search” in Japanese. Everyone seems to be getting the name wrong… Wales says Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet and it is currently broken. In his opinion, it is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. He says his new project will change all that. Following Wikipedia social search logic, Wales is betting on the editorial judgment of people to out perform the algorithmic searches of Google, Yahoo and others that are so Web 1.0. Wales is quoted in the UK’s The Times, “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.” Want to help? Jimbo is looking for community members to continue the development of Wikiasari. If you’d like to help build people-powered search results and an open-source alternative for web search, join the mailing list. Mashable isn’t overly enthusiastic about the venture and points out that Social search has been tried a number of times and failed, largely due to a lack of motivation on the part of the “editors” and the fact that Google is generally considered to deliver high quality results. Andrew Lih suggests that rather than reinventing the wheel with another search engine, Wales might have better luck using a hybrid of Google’s algorithmic search, beefed up with the external links from Wikipedia, Wikitravel, etc. Lih thinks its a problem to depend purely on human-oriented processes for recommending links for a search engine result. While humans might be good for the long-term horizon, spidering the Internet gets the fastest changing information. It was reported that Amazon was involved with this venture but Jimmy Wales says they are nothing more than a “valued invester,” and that Wikisaria has nothing do do with A9 or Amazon. A notice on the Wikia Main Page says, “Welcome to Search Wikia, a project to create the search engine that changes everything. This site is currently being completely reworked, until December 27th.” I, for one, can’t wait to see what they come up with. Filed under: social networking, Search […]
December 28th, 2006 07:24
Angela has publicly stated on talk:Wikia that it wasn’t an announcement, just a statement. But, with the amount of press it received, they decided Wikia might as well relaunch the thing.
It’s definitely not called Wikisari. That was never going to be the website name, just the software’s name.
December 31st, 2006 19:29
Wikipedia is the key to most success online, when it comes to collabritive content adding. I have spent many hours writing articles for Jimmy Wales and am very happy with this project. I am based in Seminole FL close to the wikipedia offices in St Petersburg. I love contributing!
Happy New Year Bloggers!