by Playfuls Staff |
26th December 2006
Jimmy Wales, the man who created
Wikipedia, is planning to enter into search engine market with the financial
help from the biggest online retailer, Amazon.com.
Wales’ project, called Wikiasari,
will use same [more] user-based technology he perfected for Wikipedia.
The commercial version of the
search engine will be developed through San Mateo, Calif.-based Wikia Inc.,
with a provisional launch planned for the first quarter of 2007, he said in an
interview for The Times of London.
Wales believes that the human judgement
is better than any computer search algorithm. “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.”
The commercial version of the
search engine will be developed through San Mateo, Calif.-based Wikia Inc.,
with a provisional launch planned for the first quarter of 2007, he said.
Finding different ways to improve
the search techniques business was a hot topic during 2006. In November in
their effort to better index the web sites Google, Yahoo and Microsoft decided
to team up and use the same tool, called Sitemaps.
The tool, initially developed by
Google, is a easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on
their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is
an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about
each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how
important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can
more intelligently crawl the site. Sitemaps are especially important if a site
uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.
As for the user generated search engines,
Google launched in October Google Custom Search Engine, which allows users to
have control over what shows up in their search index.
The Google Custom Search Engine
enables users to restrict searches to specific pages and websites, offering
them the possibility to customize searches to their hearts’ desire. They can
choose which pages will be included in their search index, how the pages are
arranged in order of priority and what the final page will look like. They can
even decide if other users can contribute to the index. The user has total
control over the search process. The big idea is to sift the relevant
information from the irrelevant, in contrast to generic search engines that
make no discriminations.
So, as you can see it won’t be a
easy life for Wikiasari, but let’s see what Wales will unveil in 2007.
