“Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.
Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.
There have been some amazing projects in recent years which have matured now to the point that a new alternative is possible. Wikia is funding and supporting the development of something radically new.
Nutch and Lucene and some other projects now provide the background infrastructure that we need to generate a new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot. Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search.
Help me out, spread the word. I am looking for people to continue the development of a wiki-inspired search engine. Specifically community members who would like to help build people-powered search results and developers to help us build an open-source alternative for web search.”
What a wonderful idea(l), however, just as with anything else that a people touch, it gets tainted.
We are a diverse and intelligent race, human beings, however, with all of the knowledge and understanding that we posses, we still kill, take advantage of and, more bluntly, screw each other in every context. That is why the algorithm engines are on top. We also don’t care about ourselves, let alone others, hence the fall of ODP. My prediction: they will stay that way until a fully functional AI is completed and applied to search.
Notable information from other sources:
Pandia:
“It is not clear how Wales is going to harvest the power of human judgment. This is clearly more than a directory edited by humans, like the Open Directory Project (ODP). Wales needs a team that is able to cover more sites than the ODP.
Some of the quotations seem to indicate that we are talking about a ranking system which gives each page (or site?) included a quality score by one (or several?) of the volunteers. This quality score then replaces the PageRank given to pages by Google.”
“Wikipedia is an amazing success story that nobody could or would have predicted. So maybe Wikiasari holds the same promise but my sense is that it will have to look and act quite different from Google or Yahoo! to gain usage, but at the same time be as simple to use.”
“The search engine, code-named Wikiasari, would combine open source technology and human intervention to deliver more relevant results than the algorithm-based systems used today, Wales said Tuesday. “Human intelligence is still the best thing we have, so let’s let humans do what they do best, and computers do what they do best.” Wikiasari combines the Hawaiian word for quick, “wiki,” with the Japanese word “asari,” which means “rummaging search.”
Apparently Jimmy is planning on taking the Nutch engine and mashing it up with conversational media approaches like Wikipedia. So far, no idea exactly how, and he mentions a two-year time frame…Hmmm…”
“There’s a lot of speculation going around, so much it will make your head spin. However, here are some facts:
– Wikipedia founder James Wales is planning on launching a new search engine first quarter 2007.
– Amazon nor A9 is involved with the project
– It will be a “people-powered” search engine
– It will be built as open-source
– Wikiasari is the software name, not the Search Engine name”
In conclusion:
I think that the algorithms that the big four use gives structure to the web and they are the only unbiased source that we currently have. I like the idea, but think that these goals are lofty at best.
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