Wikiasari - Social Search Engine
According to a report on Information Week, Wikipedia founders plan to build a commercial search engine (Wikiasari) combining algorithmic technology with human power. Combining the Open source search engine Nutch with human input they plan improve relevancy and compete against Google and Yahoo!. The detail of how this would work is still unclear
Wales doesn’t know how his search engine would combine human intelligence and technology. “We really haven’t determined how all of this is going to work,” he said.
The idea of using people to refine relevance is nothing new and isn’t something that has gone unnoticed by nearly everyone invloved in search. Afterall, there’s only so much you can do with link analysis. Yahoo! has already ventured into social search with MyWeb, where people can tag and save results.
But are the Wiki-guys best placed to develop a search engine - I’m not convinced. Even if they were able to develop the ranking method, execution on scale is not easy. Google’s success is largely due to solving that problem. There’s been many search engines with good ranking methods, which simply failed due to poor scalability. And I just don’t see these guys building a search engine in a couple of years that has the same crawling and indexing capabilities as Google.
A better way forward would have been for them to collaborate with one of the majors. Yahoo! has already started to play with social search, and I’m sure Google have their plans. Social search is one of the most exciting things waiting to happen, but I really doubt that the Wiki-crew is going to deliver that promise anytime soon.
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