Wikipedia search on the way
p2pnet.net News:- What will almost certainly become a serious Google competitor is slated for launch in the New year.
The question is: when it hits the dizzy heights of mass user acceptance, will it do a Google? In other words, will it relegate the people who powered its success to third or fourth position of importance in its relentless acquisition of the almighty dollar?
Unlikely if only because the new search engine will be launched by Wikipedia. But on the other hand, it is working with amazon.com, and according to The Times Online, “The revenue model of search is advertising.”
Be that as it may, “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,” says The Times Online..
“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.”
And Wales believes Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is, “no match for the editorial judgment of humans,” says the story, which has him saying”
“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.”
Catching Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft’s MSN, “or even smaller operators such as Ask.com will be a difficult challenge, Mr Wales conceded”.
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Also See:
The Times Online – Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google, December 23, 2006
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