Wikia, the San Mateo start-up founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, is working on a search engine that will use the same strategy as Wikipedia’s user-reliant encyclopedia.
The project is secretive, but has a preliminary launch date of the first quarter of 2007, the Times of London reports.
Wales says Google’s flaws have become more 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…
Of course, Wikipedia’s reliance more than a thousand of human administrators has its own problems, such as human bias, so there will be no perfect fix. And there are plenty of other so-called social search engines that have already launched with varying strategies. VentureBeat recently reported on Yoono and Collarity, for example. There are ton of others. Just look at the Firefox recommended add-ons; about half of them have some sort of social search feature. And Yahoo could do a lot more with its social features (Delicious, Flickr and others), as Fred Wilson notes.
The idea is to have humans lend a hand in judging what sites should appear in search results. Google relies on computers, used to count things like the number of links a site has — and spammers are taking advantage of it. Among open-source, user-generated sites, Wikipedia has been among the more successful (it has more than 1.5 million articles, and despite its flaws and plenty of critiques, the site has gained a certain credibility). However, it is unclear how Wales’ other site, Wikia, is performing. Unlike Wikipedia, Wikia is for-profit, and it’s not certain how much user loyalty can be generated for such a site.
Wikia recently received a cash infusion from Amazon to help build out its features, as VentureBeat first reported here.
According to the Times, the search project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.
The project will reportedly be built on open source search platforms Nutch and Lucene. Techcrunch has more details here.
Tags: co:Collarity, co:Wikia, co:Wikipedia, co:Yoono, lucene, nutch, people:Jimmy-Wales, wikiasari7 Comments
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john m said:
what are your thoughts on the new guided search site Cha Cha (www.chacha.com)
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Matt Marshall said:
We’ve reviewed it on VentureBeat. don’t think it scales.
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Monica said:
Wikia is such a loser. That’s why he fools everyone around with a new secretive concept
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NitinK said:
Hey, Matt - this almost feels like an old story by now! As the Search Marketing Gurus have pointed out, there has already been a lot of excitement and hysteria about this announcement. (It’s remarkable how fast the blogosphere moves!)
Also, note that the TechCrunch screenshot may or may not be accurate.
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Zaid Farooqui said:
Wikia aside, I think news such as this does get us to ponder on a difficult question: what will search be like 5 years from now? Or 10 years? Or 20 years?
The lazy amongst us would say Google will continue to dominate. But really, beside Microsoft it is hard for ONE company to continue to dominate a market for more than a decade. We are even beginning to see cracks in Microsoft.
Regardless, Microsoft is an EXCEPTIONAL company to have to continued its dominance in a market for such prolonged period of time. Can google do the same?
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NitinK said:
Hey - you deleted my comment! :-)
Sorry - I was just delighted to have blogged something ahead of you. I’m a regular reader of VentureBeat and look to you for a regular “Valley News” fix. Keep up the good work! (And please remove this comment as well.)
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Leon said:
There are certainly ways to chip away part of Google’s business. Wikipedia is an excellent example of such. Depending on the subjects I search, I frequently go to Wikipedia directly instead of search on Google.
As long as you try, you get a chance to succeed but no guarantee. That applies to Wikia as well.
Best of luck to Jimmy Wales. And many thanks to Wikipedia, a brilliant service for the public good!
