Wikipedia Founder Working on User-Powered Search 74
An anonymous reader writes "Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikia corporation, has revealed plans to offer a user-driven search engine. Ars Technica reports that the plan is to leverage user preferences to pick the 'best' site for any given search term, while at the same time utilizing advertising for commercial gain. The article admits this may not be the ideal solution: 'Users may be reluctant to contribute to the betterment of a commercial site that may end up being bought by a bigger company. Consider, for example, the tragic death of TV Tome, a comprehensive community-driven television content guide that was eventually bought by CNET and transformed into a garish, excessively commercialized Web 2.0 monstrosity of significantly less value to users.' Just the same, Wales seems very enthusiastic in the Times Online article highlighting this venture."
Controversial subjects (Score:2, Insightful)
Nevermind something as sedate as GWB or Blair or global warning or religion. What about vi vs emacs?
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See http://search.wikia.com/wiki/search:News [wikia.com]
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One word: (Score:1, Insightful)
Please explain how you're going to handle gaming the system by seo spammers.
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Well, there are many mechanisms to choose from, some of which are already implemented on Wikipedia. There are many commercial and political interests in the biggest and most popular online encyclopedia, so this search venture is not that very different in that sense.
The real answer, I guess, is that you can't control it for all cases, but you can be sure that the most popular terms will have enough eyes on them to be safe from it.
Karma Whoring (Score:1, Insightful)
Early rumors had him working with Amazon in the effort, but this [mashable.com] should clear things up.
Google, Amazon, Opera, Mozilla, all are good ideas but as they expand their reach, they turn to crap. Google is going to Hell, Amazon is there, Opera likes the road, and Moz? They seem to be eyeing it.
Whatever happened to, "Do what you do best. Forget the rest"?
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WED Fan
True but heaven for trolls, imagine a group working together...what they could accomplish with this type of tool at our disposal.
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Didn't you get the memo, it was scrapped along with web 1.0.
The new one is "Do what people suggest, and remember the REST".
TV Tome Replacement (Score:5, Insightful)
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Out sourced. (Score:4, Funny)
Source by which source? (Score:1)
It'd have to solve many of the current probs with the W, for one. Prob's such as accuracy, which apparently, said proposer [arstechnica.com] doesn't believe W should be trusted for. Not to mention filtering for biased-users who'd get all their friends to promote irrelevant attachments to search terms, using the engine as a source
Been there, done that... (Score:5, Interesting)
Google done this? (Score:1)
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Time will tell who is right but (Score:5, Informative)
Searching the Web is a very challenging problem (that's why few companies do it): volume of data is huge and one only appreciates value of good algorithms when faced with situation when poor algorithms make stuff run for weeks failing near the end and you have to restart the run to wait another week. You can either try to handle this very big problem, which is very hard even if you have the money (look at Amazon's A9 funded with millions, yet they licensed Google's code and database), or you can try to reduce the problem: only focus on a handful of "important" pages - Yahoo did that when they were human edited directory/search engine hybrid.
It seems to me that Mr Wales entertains the illusion that a very small number of manually checked pages in the Web space will be sufficient to satisfy vast majority (and it has got to be 98%+ as I won't be hopping from one search engine to another) of search queries. If this was the case then we would still be using Yahoo that did pretty much just that, yet almost everyone (including Yahoo) moved to algorithmic search engines because it is the only way to handle billions of pages, and billions of pages you will have to handle: even if you just index homepages of all registered domain names you will be dealing with 100 mln+ pages, that's good 20 times more than articles in Wikipedia and checking pages can be far more duller than reading nice article you have some personal interest in.
What I find ironic that our own concept of the search engine was removed from Wikipedia because we were supposedly "not noteable enough", that's the sign how they handle problem of "too much data" in Wikipedia - they just reduce the problem by reducing datasets greatly, sometimes this is done wrongly, sometimes rightly and it might well work for Wikipedia, but it sure as hell won't work for Web scale searches. Oh, and by the way who said Google and others don't use human reviewers? They sure do, just check TrustRank [wikipedia.org], this link is ranked as #1 match on Google for search TrustRank! Notice what Wikipedia tells us: "While human experts can easily identify spam, it is too expensive to evaluate manually a large number of pages."
Human input plays an important (although fairly unknown as they prefer to keep it secret) role in the state of the art search engines, however suggestion that humans can handle billions of pages and/or that a handful of pages will be sufficient for a general purpose search engine is wrong and a very backwards move that will result in exactly the kind of wrong attitude present in Wikipedia now.
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Doomed to repeat it, I guess (Score:4, Informative)
An orphaned ref to Magellan, the human powered search engine [gocee.com]
Didn't work before when there were a lot less sites out there, not likely to work this time, either.
jh
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I think just about every actual content idea has since made money for some company or other, but with many casualties along the way. But given how many businesses fail, let alone new busines
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What was
Of course he likes the attention it brings (Score:2)
So the guy founded Wikipedia. Good for him. It doesn't mean he walks on water, and the advent of yet another search engine doesn't deserve front page of slashdot. Especially when you know its going to get swamped by spammers (or their bots) and quickly become u
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Further Polarize the word? (Score:2)
A new social search is already out there. (Score:2, Informative)
Why would this work exactly? (Score:1)
Fast forward to days of Google and Wikipedia and you have infinitely better "dumb" search, and an equally easy to use, generally decently accurate, and well contained treatment of a dizzying array of topics.
So, what's needed to fill the "search for information" gap? I dou
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TVTome is an excellent example (Score:2)
Even Dmoz, for which I have great fondness and respect, has been crippled for years by a non-free license that allowed AOL to run it into the dirt. (See the recent 6 week server outage, for which there is simply no excuse.) (The Dmoz lice
Shills? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google already has this (Score:2, Funny)
Advertising (Score:1)
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Just look at what are/were the most advertized things around:
Cigarettes (Thank god we finally got laws to keep those off)
Soft Drinks
Fast Food
SUVs
All total crap that we would live much better without. But they hang around by blatantly manipulating innocent bystanders brains with constant exposure to absolutely unsubstantiated
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but ALL adsense farms look the same... (Score:1)
Prove me wrong, and you'd start the next .com boom...
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wiki weighted search (Score:5, Insightful)
The only good thing about this is that possibly Wikipedia might be ousted from the primary or secondary page rank for most subjects. That is an authority most highly undeserved, and proof of nothing more than how far we need to go in terms of achieving accurate search.
I think (hope) this is just a piece of self publicity. I doubt they have the technology - judging by the fact that at peak times Wikipedia search shuts down and defaults to Google and Yahoo.
Interesting too, that while Google employs seriously smart people and is founded by seriously smart people, that Jimbo and whomever he cobbles together from the smart-search-technologists-who-decided-not-to-wor
We have seen very clearly that Wikipedia is extremely vulnerable to, and tainted with, group-think manipulation. (Jimbo's icon, Ayn Rand as one very tiny example of many). Why would anyone think this search will be in any way different. This looks just as vulnerable and easy to manipulate if you get a group together. Which every SEO blackhat on the planet will do on the day of launch. This looks much easier to manipulate than meta tags, or page rank.
I'm sure SEO blackhats and right wing organisations are foaming at the mouth with excitement at this wonderful Christmas announcement.
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I'm sure SEO blackhats and right wing organisations are foaming at the mouth with excitement at this wonderful Christmas announcement.
The one thing we all learned post 9/11 is how it can be to tell the difference between foam and saliva. I'm coming to the opinion that foam is a just a glandular camoflage used to disguise malice as outrage.
Why start there? (Score:1)
Why this won't work. (Score:2)
Problems:
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You're going to run out of money, because..
( ) - Your ass will get sued for patent violation
( ) - No-one would be stupid enough to buy you out
( ) - No-one would be stupid enough to pay for your product
etc..
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Excellent. Just what we need, more hermetic negativism designed to throw the baby out with the bath water so that the earth can continue to spin on its present axis.
war on spam = Iraq
war on botnets = Afghanistan
While we're at it, let's do one for the war on drugs and the war on terror for good measure. Let's do one for poverty in Africa, and dementia in the elderly. Let's do one for hieroglyphics, the alphabet, the digital number system, and man-made fire. Think of the untold failures and aggravation ca
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But on Slashdot these sorts of things are not hermetic
Classic (Score:1)
downvoters (Score:1)
Is that anything like ytmnd's voting system? Because if it is, Wiki will have it's own class of Downvoters.
stumbleupon.com? (Score:1)
They have a search functionality as well.
InfraSearch (Score:2)
Actually this is not going to happen (Score:3, Informative)
On a WMF mailing list Angela said that there was no substance to all this. I had also heard from other channels that there is not much to this.
So even though it is nice to speculate, there is not much to all this.
Thanks,
GerardM
User-Powered? What's wrong with computer-powered? (Score:1)
The fact is that many (of not all) search engines use human input to rank search results. For example, Google's PageRank [google.com] is about links put on pages by whom? Humans, of course.
OK, so you found a new way of extracting rating info from humans? Let's talk about that, but please stop bringing this "People vs. Computers" nonsense.
After getting burned with CDDB, forget it (Score:4, Informative)
I tried it once.... (Score:1)
Why do I live in such a small country, where nobody has a clue.... sigh...
Anybody got a job working with interesting people that can actually think ????
Other Priorities? (Score:2)
this is easy to implement (Score:2)
make a collaborative layer on top of Google (Score:2)
Make a collaboration from Wisdom of Crowds (Score:2)
I just posted this the other day on the Wisdom of Crowds article; here is the link [slashdot.org]:
What's the next logical step?
Search engines. Google's PageRank algorithm may point to highly rated *websites*, but searches themselves can be rated. Since most queries are less than 3 words, track where all less-than-3-word-queries go to, and rate *those* sites higher. Since humans are doing the searchi
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People never Learn (Score:2)
I have quite a view of my old customers who know me personally from my webhosting company and they still can't understand how I would abandon them and sell the company, not that I wan
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Trust me, I've had offers to do exactly that, due to some huge infighting that took place on one particularly prominent Wikimedia project. I politely refused, prefering to stick within th
Stoopid stoopid idea.... (Score:1)