From The Times of London (via TechMeme):
[Wikipedia founder Jimbo] 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 encyclopaedia 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.”
Mr Wales believes that the reputation already fostered by his Wikipedia community and the transparency of his technology will build sufficient trust in his search engine to bring in advertising revenue and make the Wikiasari venture profitable.
I like the idea in principle, but I can see two gaping holes: One is simply that pages that are highly worthy but hugely unknown will not be ranked. And, more obviously, the kind of bogus rank-spamming evident at sites like Digg is a real risk.
A mash-up using Google for raw results filtered through Wikiasari’s vetting might be a great short-answer search engine, though…
A further thought: Jimmy Wales already has access to a fine database of social site rankings: Wikipedia itself. Starting there and making ranking easy through the search-engine UI, he might have a product…
Technorati Tags: real estate marketing
Jim says:
Great idea, one I’ve been thinking about for a while. In my market, the top ranking real estate websites are utterly worthless, with no real content, a design stuck in ’95 and a ton of “supposedly” relevant links.
Rank spamming can be simply eliminated the way google does it. Everyone gets to have an account that allows them to rank the page once every so often, BUT, like the gmail accounts, it has to be verified by something unique, like a cell phone #.
Pages that have no rank yet, can be displayed as well in a separate category along with the top ranked pages.
It’s about time we let people decide if the page is good or not. Put those SEO scam artists out of business.
December 24, 2006 — 6:14 pm
Drew Nichols says:
Jim, that is a fantastic idea. But do you think that a more relevant Google will happen anytime soon?
January 16, 2007 — 9:59 pm