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Recently there was a buzz about Wikiasari. Techcrunch wrote an article “Wikia To Launch Search Engine” and provided a screenshot, too. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, says:

`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. 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.` 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. 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.

Google search engine uses an algorithm to evaluate the pages. One of the things with highest priority is that google algorithms calculates how many other websites are pointing to yours, which in turn gives the page rank of your web site.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written by thousands of contributors from around the world, using free open-source software. Mr Wales idea is to use this network of `Wikipedians` and the same type of free software to create his search engine.

Jimmy Wales:

“The project to build the community to build the search engine is launching in the first quarter of 2007, not the search engine itself. We may have something up pretty quickly, maybe some sort of demo or test for people to start playing with. But we don’t want to build up expectations that people can come in three months and check out this Google-killing search engine that we’ve written from scratch. It’s not going to happen that fast.

What we want to do now is get the community going and get the transparent algorithms going so we can start the real work. It’s going to be a couple of years before this really turns into something interesting.”

You can find more information on the project page: Search Wikia

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 10:11 pm and is filed under web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.