December 28, 2006 | Thursday
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to take on Google
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |Search Engines |Google |Search Technology
With the help of Amazon, Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales will be launching a new search engine which he hopes will become a big threat to the likes of Google and Yahoo.
The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”. 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.
“Google 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 ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” he said...Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans…
“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We 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.”
And yes, the revenue model for Wikiasari will be advertising-centred. RSS and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer wishes Wales good luck:
Google is repeating the pattern of the previous generation of search engines (Alta Vista, Infoseek) were doing when Google zigged to their zag, so successfully. Today, Google is fattening up and spreading out, going after Microsoft in productivity apps, chasing the TV networks with YouTube. Etc etc. Today search is only one of the things Google is doing, and it may not be the most important thing.
...Even if there are reasons to believe that Wales’s effort will fail, I’m glad he’s trying. We need more people who don’t accept the hype, and are willing to try to get to the next level. With enough tries will come success, and perhaps a new search business that is based on the ideas of the 21st century.
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