Wikipedia's Search Engine Plan 102
jasonoik writes "Wikia, the commercial company founded by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, reveals plans for a new, editable search engine. They say that the goal of the project is to get 5% of the search market. The service does not yet an official release date. The article also leaves open the possibility that the search results may contain ads, and concludes by listing figures of the web advertisement market." Update: 03/11 17:24 GMT by KD : Wikia and Wikipedia are separate companies.
Great for the Economy (Score:2, Interesting)
Wikipedia's search sucks ass! (Score:3, Interesting)
If your serious about this, don't compete with google, instead partner with google and make a wiki.google.com provide google's own search results & ads, but filtered and processed in various ways, which are handled by the wiki.
For example, you want to give only unique sites/hits but this may depend upon the host's url.
Re:Wikipedia's search sucks ass! (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, I've never had problems with the wikipedia search engine. More often than not, I enter something I'm looking for and it finds the correct article 95% of the time, with the spelling corrected and the missing words inserted. Of course, I have a vague idea of how what I'm looking for is spelled in the first place, perhaps I'm helping the search engine, but really so far I'm really not disappointed with it.
At any rate, flip through a real paper encylopedia and you'll find the "search engine" (the thesaurus) to be a real pain compared to anything Wikipedia can come up with, therefore I guess for an encyclopedia, I'm happy enough with it.
Use it for Wikipedia, not the entire Internet (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree completely - the default wiki search needs major, major work. If they get this search software working and add it to Mediawiki, it'll be a major improvement. As a standalone search engine, however, I don't see the point.
What's the advantage of having user-editable search results? Anyone can submit sites to Google already. I don't know the exact statistics, but I'd imagine that most sites that aren't complete trash end up getting accepted - my site is a jumble of code I put together to learn PHP and MySQL, and looks like something out of 1995. It got included just fine. Therefore, the only difference this search engine would have is the inclusion of Google's rejects.
Then we have the editing. Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and believer in the "everyone can edit" system. Nevertheless, I really don't see how free editing can be useful in a search engine. I remember back when Google was first released, one of the things that made it so special is that none of the results were placed by hand. Other search engines placed higher-paying customers at the top (I have no idea if they still do that - I never use anything but Google these days) and consequently the results tended to have problems. User-editing will likely have an even worse affect, with people putting sites that don't belong on top before those that do.
Yes, there will be the community to catch that, but there's a major difference between an encyclopedia and a search engine. In an encyclopedia, there is a limited number of articles, and each one is about a very specific subject matter. There are an infinite number of search possibilities, and very few of them describe only one thing. For example, I'm a big fan of Heroes. Therefore, I go to the search engine and edit the search for "Mr. Bennet" (one of the characters) to list some sites about him before everything else. Then my evil clone, swd09, comes along. He is a big fan of Pride and Prejudice, and changes my edit to list sites about Mr. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice before everything else. I then change it back, and an edit war begins. In an encyclopedia, it could eventually be settled by virtue of the fact that an article is about one or the other. If someone tries to put information about Mr. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice in the Heroes article, it's clear that they're in the wrong. In a search engine, though, how can anyone say whether Mr. Bennet from Heroes or Mr. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice is more important? There's no way to come to a true consensus. To solve the problem, the administration will have to put its foot down and arbitrarily decide, and we end up with a non-user edited system without the neutrality of an algorithm.
Damn... (Score:2, Interesting)