Wikipedia Founder In Google Challenge

[turbopowerdmaxsteel 0]

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 â a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for ârummaging searchâ.

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.

Earlier this year he secured multimillion-dollar funding from amazon.com and a separate cash injection from a group of Silicon Valley financiers to finance projects at Wikia.

However, it is understood that amazon has also collaborated with Mr Wales on the search engine project and is expected to lend its support to the venture in the future.

Mr Wales, a 40-year-old former options trader, believes that, as the popularity of Google has grown, obvious flaws in its search engine technology have become apparent.

âGoogle 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 âTampa hotelsâ, for example, and you will not get any useful results,â he said.

Spammers and commercial ventures are also learning how to manipulate Googleâs computer-based search, he added.

Mr Wales believes that Googleâs computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans.

Google searches are conducted using an algorithm that calculates how many other websites are linked to a certain site, which in turn gives the material found by the search a ranking. Therefore, the first result in any Google search is the website that has the most links pointing to it.

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia written by thousands of contributors from around the world, known as âWikipediansâ, using free open-source software.

Mr Wales aims to exploit the same network of followers and the same type of free software to create his search engine.

âEssentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: âthis page is good, this page sucksâ,â Mr Wales said. âComputers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.

âBut we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,â he added. âWe 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.â

Mr Wales believes that the reputation already fostered by his Wikipedia community and the transparency of his technology will build sufficient trust in his search engine to bring in advertising revenue and make the Wikiasari venture profitable.

âThe revenue model of search is advertising. Transparency in search, therefore, is like transparency in news. If the quality is there people will come.â

Catching up with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoftâs MSN or even smaller operators such as Ask.com will be a difficult challenge, Mr Wales conceded.

Source: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/

From my experience, I think Wikipedia does a really good job. I have learnt about so many things from it. Hope they win the search engine battle .Either ways, we are going to be the winners.
Edited December 27, 2006 by turbopowerdmaxsteel (see edit history)

[seec77 0]

I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia! My friends call me a wikigeek. Even though I never make any substantial contributions to the encyclopedia, I usually make small logistical, functional or syntactical changes which I think are also a bit helpful to the growing database of information. I know that given such a search engine will be operational, I'll help make it better by ranking pages as helpful or not, but I'm not really sure if this idea is such a great one.

 

Another search engine? I think we all agree that Google is doing a great job, and two search engines are going to be messy, create flame wars, and we won't be able to enjoy both of the searching technologies without much trouble. How about wikifying Google? I mean, Pagerank, the algorithm working for Google's search, is really innovative, and has proven itself in the test of time, but as anything else, it has its disadvantages. One big downside the Pagerank is the fact that lots of search queries return useless, spam pages because they are linked to by lots of places around the web.

 

Now, the best solution, I think, would be a merging of a few separate methods for ranking pages. Why not put a "useful/useless" button next to Google search results, that will allow users to help rank sites? It works with the very correct fact pointed out by Wales, that human editorial judgement is the best we can get to a perfect search engine. Even though, by using Google's excellent existing ways of pageranking, it'll let us rank only relevant pages!

 

What do you guys think? As much as I enjoy the whole atmosphere, and the results of that atmosphere, at Wikipedia, I also think that Google is a never-seen-before piece of quality software, and losing any of these would be a waste.

[Saint_Michael 3]

If i where smart I would try and make Wikipedia a lot better, because for one Every College does not accept the info that on wikipedia just because most of it is wrong and the fact people can edit it just like that.Of course Jimmy could be a moron and doesn't know how to use google right when he searches it. Also those flame wars you talking about are happening with yahoo google and msn so nothing will be different.Of course his "Search Engine" has to offer something that has never been seen. It might be in the programming but anything else is just copycatting from someone elses search engine. If google was smart they start buying these smaller search engines to prevent anyone from getting a better search advantage if any.

[FirefoxRocks 0]

I do edit Wikipedia! My account at Wikipedia is FirefoxRocks. :) I usually work on WikiProjects such as redirection relinks and stuff like that.

 

For searching for information on a specific topic, I usually use Wikipedia. For searching in general, I use Google or Windows Live Search.

 

About 2 years ago, I thought that Google and Wikipedia collaborated on searching and that some Wikipedia content was listed on the first page of Google searches of keywords. Has this been terminated or what?