Thursday, December 20, 2007
Wikipedia's Google Killer?
From New Scientist's Tech Pages:
While I do commend not sharing search terms with advertisers, if you don't store search terms somewhere, then how can you compile information on popular searches? How do you sort through millions of variations? How do you know what to give people when they search for something if you don't have anything to match that search term to?
Ah, maybe they mean something else. Over the past few years, Wikipedia has become (a bit of) an elitist community where if you don't spend long days editing and updating entries, any submitted entry has the potential of being attacked within two minutes by someone who does, all in a world where every single Pokemon character has its own page.
At this point, anything with "Wikipedia" attached may be slightly soured, but we are looking forward to something new, even if we only end up making fun of it.
The open-source search engine backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales could go live as an early test version as soon as next week. Unlike Google, Search Wikia will not share search data with advertisers, nor invade privacy by storing users' search terms.Now that you've read the blurb, feel free to openly laugh at the title if you have not already.
In a SETI@home-style project, 500 volunteers are running web-crawlers to compile Search Wikia's web index, which so far totals 100 million pages. Jeremie Miller, the project's technology chief, hopes an "alpha" version of the engine will be running by Christmas. As well as search, it will offer "wiki-style tools to improve search and basic social networking", he says. Users will also be able to vote on the effectiveness of search hits.
But don't expect too much, too soon. "The alpha version will probably break in numerous ways we can't predict, but that'll help us improve it," Miller says.
While I do commend not sharing search terms with advertisers, if you don't store search terms somewhere, then how can you compile information on popular searches? How do you sort through millions of variations? How do you know what to give people when they search for something if you don't have anything to match that search term to?
Ah, maybe they mean something else. Over the past few years, Wikipedia has become (a bit of) an elitist community where if you don't spend long days editing and updating entries, any submitted entry has the potential of being attacked within two minutes by someone who does, all in a world where every single Pokemon character has its own page.
At this point, anything with "Wikipedia" attached may be slightly soured, but we are looking forward to something new, even if we only end up making fun of it.
Labels: google, internets, online tech, search engines, Wikipedia
posted by Symetri at 12/20/2007 03:24:00 PM 
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