Wikipedia Founder Plans Search Engine

[RedEarth]

The search engine, code-named Wikiasari, would combine open source technology and human intervention to deliver more relevant results than the algorithm-based systems used today.


By Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek
Dec. 26, 2006
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196701966



Wales, founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is planning to build an online commercial search engine that would compete with Google and Yahoo.

The search engine, code-named Wikiasari, would combine open source technology and human intervention to deliver more relevant results than the algorithm-based systems used today, Wales said Tuesday. "Human intelligence is still the best thing we have, so let's let humans do what they do best, and computers do what they do best." Wikiasari combines the Hawaiian word for quick, "wiki," with the Japanese word "asari," which means "rummaging search."

Relevance remains a challenge in online search, since machines can only take a roundabout approach in determining the ranking of results delivered to people's queries. For example, Google's automated system considers the number of links to a Web site in determining whether it's closer to the top or bottom of results.

Wales plans to combine the user-based technology behind nonprofit Wikipedia with open source Web-search software called Nutch, which is part of the Apache Lucene project. The latter has developed a full-featured text search engine written in Java.

http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=196701966

[NashVegas]

1. I Can't Wait

it's so freaking tiring to come across parked, commercial, links pages when doing a search.

[SayWhatYo]

2. I hate those pages...

Not only due to the reason you mentioned, but also because they always seem to grab up the cool domain name I wanted... Any why? So that some jackasses could create some pre-canned page full of links that no one will ever look at.