August 01, 2007 | Wednesday
People-powered search, Wikipedia-style
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |Search Engines |Search Research |Search Technology
The news that Wikipedia founder Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales hopes to challenge Google and Yahoo with a community-driven search engine has made a few industry commentators sit up and take notice. That’s only natural, considering the phenomenon and oft-cited resource - even by mainstream print press - that Wikipedia has become. But the proposed search engine deserves some scrutiny, as does any endeavor that aims to take on the existing search giants.
Wikia, the for-profit venture run by Wales, recently acquired an open source web crawler called Grub from LookSmart, a company that pioneered search years ago, and more recently has found some success with its social bookmarking tool, Furl. Yes, everyone’s going Web 2.0 these days, even if they couldn’t tell you what it actually means.
Wales is talking up his belief that search as it is now is “broken” and that a search engine that enhances algorithmic results with human editors and collaboration is the way forward.
Well, if you asked a thousand users whether they think search is broken, most of them probably would not agree with Wales. Advertisers, search geeks, and agencies who have long wishlists of changes for the engines might agree with him...but they are not the ones who determine search market share. Wales has a massive challenge in front of him if he is going to try to take down the likes of Google. Google might respond to Wales: “You and what army?” As Om Malik writes in a very lengthy analysis of Wales’ proposal:
Even if a start-up comes up with a better alogrithm, it still needs to sink millions into infrastructure to just get into the business, and offer as fast of an experience as most people associate with Google.
Indeed, as stated in a Wikipedia article on another company attempting human-powered search, Mahalo:
Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com said, “Just like a lot of people who watch movies think they can be scriptwriters, there are a lot of people who use search engines who think they can build a search engine.” Lanzone cited the fact that about 60% of search inquiries to Ask are unique as just one of the challenges of running a search engine. Google claims that 20% to 25% of its search inquiries have never been used before.
Unique queries are just one of the obstacles facing Wales and Wikia’s project. Malik thinks that Wales is “hoping for death by a thousand cuts to the search incumbents”. Right now, he has yet to make a single incision.
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