TechCrunch reports a "Wikipedia-based for profit search engine" that's going to be open-sourced and based on quality of results first and depth of results second; the new search engine, which is currently under development, is going to be called Wikiasari.
I had a screen shot taken from TechCrunch that turned out not be genuine - according to Jimmy Whales - so I took it down.
You should update your story. The TechCrunch screenshot is NOT wikiasari, period. They got the story completely wrong.
The Wikia <a href=http://search.wikia.com>search</a> project has the correct story.
On the Wikia page:
"…Nutch and Lucene 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. "
I also joined the mailing list - which is about the only thing you can do at this point.
I think the value of a search engine for Wikipedia comes in as the value of pages that are community edited (in terms of quality) are better than what you can pick up on the web itself (being that so much of it is now commercial based).
There's also a long article in the Times of London about this:
"…Mr Wales, a 40-year-old former options trader, believes that, as the popularity of Google has grown, obvious flaws in its search engine technology have become apparent.
“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.
Spammers and commercial ventures are also learning how to manipulate Google’s computer-based search, he added.
Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans.
Google searches are conducted using an algorithm that calculates how many other websites are linked to a certain site, which in turn gives the material found by the search a ranking. Therefore, the first result in any Google search is the website that has the most links pointing to it.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written by thousands of contributors from around the world, known as “Wikipedians”, using free open-source software.
Mr Wales aims to exploit the same network of followers and the same type of free software to create his search engine.
“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.”
Right now, no one much knows the term "Wikiasari" (according to Blogpulse) but I'm curious to see where this all goes next year.
