Could Open Source Lead to a Meritocratic Search Engine? 148
Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "When Jimmy Wales recently announced the
Search Wikia
project,
an attempt to build an open-source search engine around the user-driven
model
that gave birth to Wikipedia, he said
his goal was to create
"the search engine that changes everything", as he underscored in a
February
5 talk
at New York University. I think it could, although not for the same main
reasons that
Wales has put forth -- I think that for a search engine to be truly
meritocratic would be more of
a revolution than for a search engine to be open-source, although both
would be large steps
forward. Indeed, if a search engine
could be built that really returned results in order of average
desirability
to users, and resisted efforts by companies to "game" the system (even if
everyone knew precisely how the
ranking algorithm worked),
it's hard to overstate how much that would change things both for
businesses and consumers. The key question is whether such an algorithm
could
be created that wouldn't be vulnerable to non-merit-based manipulation.
Regardless of what algorithms may be currently under consideration by
thinkers within
the Wikia company, I want to argue logically for some necessary
properties that such an algorithm should have in order to be effective.
Because if their search engine becomes popular, they will face such huge
efforts
from companies trying to manipulate the search results, that it will make
Wikipedia
vandalism look like a cakewalk." The rest of his essay follows.
