| The Future of Search |
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| Monday, 07 January 2008 | |||||
Wikia Search is a commercial product of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Except its creator, this search engine has nothing to do with the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. However, even though the aim is to make money from the engine by advertising eventually, the goal of Wikia Search is to use user feedback to determine which results offer the most quality. By the way, in his speech Jason Calcanis talked about Mahalo.com, the exact same concept he’s launching as well. Wikia Search clearly states on which principles it will handle the information it gathers from its users :
Transparency- Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.Community- Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.Quality- Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.Privacy- Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.Users are asked to give as much feedback as they can, as well as for individual links, as well as general feedback. Websites can score negative feedback as well, for example because they offer more advertisements than content. Sites with negative feedback will score very badly in search engines like these, and can come into trouble fast if the concept catches on. As the system is transparent, this type of search will also change Search Engine Optimizing. No longer will only having the right Google-mix matter, but will parameters like subjective quality come into play. In our opinion, this is what you can feel organic results should have been in the first place. Logically, the results of Wikia Search type engines should be of higher quality than those of others. The only drawback user feedback Search has, is that the system will need a lot of time and/or a lot of people to process all the information to become effective. Mahalo goes so far to promise us that every link will be manually checked out before it becomes a search result, whereas Wikia Search uses an automated scoring system. Systems like these require enormous amounts of people who will probably get nothing in return for their contribution but a clean search engine. The system may only start catching on after some major spam manages to work it’s way up the other engines listings. However, user feedback has proven it’s worth in a lot of web applications. Search with user feedback will probably get Search to keep it’s status as one of the internet’s most important functions.
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