December 27, 2006 | In Technology |
Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, has announced plans to launch his own user-edited search engine, under the name Wikisari.
In a recent interview with The Times of London, Wales said that the search service would use the same user-based technology as Wikipedia, and could ultimately rival established players like Google and Yahoo. The project is being funded by Amazon.com and a group of Silicon Valley financiers.
Since its launch in 2003, the free online reference encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has grown into one of the most popular websites on the internet. It utilizes a network of thousands of volunteer contributors around the world, who use a free open-source editing interface to expand and organize the now-massive database of information.
Wales hopes to utilize the same concept in creating his search engine, working under the theory that human editors will do a better job of determining relevancy than the mathematical algorithms employed by Google and Yahoo.
A major problem with this approach, of course, is that it will be difficult to stop spammers from “volunteering” their editing services and boosting their own sites to the top Wikisari’s SERPs.
If the service ever becomes anywhere near as popular as Google, it will end up playing host to a continuous editing battle, pitting self-righteous open source aficionados against a sleazy and relentless army of internet spammers.
Although the fluid and ever-changing nature of such a service would make it a formidable competitor in the online search market, I find it difficult to believe that Wikia Inc. will be able to recruit enough manpower to keep the whole thing going in a solely user-edited format.
A better approach, in my opinion, would be to base SERPs upon a traditional algorithm, but incorporate a system of voting (much as Digg.com does), allowing users to express opinions on any given site without giving any one person the power to “edit” search results. That way, spammy results would be buried by a democratic process, with corruption and pointless editing wars kept to a minimum.
