WikiSeek should not be confused with Wikia’s upcoming search engine (although I did). Both, however, are developing community-edited search engines, and both have received assistance from Wikipedia (Wikia, though, is co-founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales).
And while Wikia pushed some more vaporware news last week about their own upcoming community edited search engine, WikiSeek quietly launched an actual product.
The main WikiSeek search engine shows results only from Wikipedia and sites linked from Wikipedia. The new community edited search engine, which they stress is experimental only at this stage, can be found at community.wikiseek.com and the results can be edited by anyone. There are a number of throttles on the service - for example, only ten results are delivered currently.
But you certainly can edit the results, as I did with a search on TechCrunch. I have no idea if a human community can really be expected to deal with the massive amount of spam that will be hitting the search engine if any appreciable traffic to the site develops, but this little (albeit Sequoia backed) company sure has guts, and they launch products.
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This is going to be one of the most interesting games in town. If anyone has the access to to fight google it is wiki. The interesting thing is that wiki readers are far better quality than googles readers. In as much as if you have a referral from google they might look at 2 pages, but a referral from wiki is more likely to look at 20.
Sorry but the results weren’t close to Google’s. It’s great they have Wikipedia results but what comes after that? I’ll stick with Google!
http://www.wikiseek.com/results.php?q=wikiseek
I’ am webmaster of http://www.izzyweb.it/ ….
this site is good and nice
i am not convinced, there aren’t enough results. when i go on google, i look for tutorials, how-tos, blog posts, movie reviews, product reviews, none of which wikiseek has.
This will be Democracy out of control. Involving users is a great thing but if this site builds decent traffic I can see great motivation to manipulate the results.
We will need to see how the site operate in practice but I have my doubts.
Human edited, One thing which Humans lack is Integrity, I dont know when AI develops will the m/cs learn this trait of Human beings. Well new features to anti commercial Open Source Knowledge base is always a welcome decision. Wiki is good but I have explored some parts and found it wanting in some ways for example
Wiktionary could add Usage of th esentence,
And every articl ecould have a synopsis for those who don’t have time and more detials for interested parties.
http://ww.tekno-world.blogspot.com
Why would users edit search results? What is going to motivate them? That’s a big question..
to say the least the search engine space is crowded; - Rb
Niche search engines, like http://www.bikerseek.com, I can see a need for. When you’re looking for motorcycle-specific info (like tech tips, riding techniques, etc.) you WANT to have people who know what is worth reading serving up results. But this?
Wikipedia has two problems: it’s content, and it’s concept.
It’s content is a mess. Many of its articles remain barren, even after all these years, while others are bloated with useless information and anecdotal nonsense. Plus tons of external links and spam. Even after all that garbage is excised what’s left is often inaccurate and unreliable.
And as for “Wikipedia — the user-edited encyclopedia” — I think people generally agree that Wikipedia’s ‘user-edited’ concept no longer exists. Many of Wikipedia’s most prominent articles are locked. Managers apparently at some point saw the the whole system falling victim to vandals and spammers, so they made the terrible mistake of surrendering editorial control to a cartel of admins who now take it upon themselves to lock articles and delete user changes at will. They now run the show; normal people have NO ACCESS to hundreds of articles throughout the website.
Given all this, it’s a real head-scratcher when i see any third party attempt to extend the failed Wiki model into new concepts. What are they hoping to accomplish? Seems to be a dead end as far as I can tell.
Funny, I just read the article about wikia in the new Business 2.0 magazine last night and was wondering when they would start to do a real wiki search attempt. The future of searching the web will have to go the path of at least some type of social intervention by the way of tagging or rating.
If too much weight is given to Wikipedia links by this or any other search engine, then there will be pressure to turn Wikipedia into a link farm.
I think it is too early to say whether wikisearch as a future or not. Wikipedia is far from being perfect but is a very decent tool for looking up info related to niche domains (text mining, named entity extraction, etc.).
Google and Wikisearch will co-exist well. Both tools are needed and I don`t seem them as competing.
I can see the reasons for using wikiseek, but already there’s the problem of spam on linked websites. For example searching for weblog: http://www.wikiseek.com/results.php?q=weblog
One other thing–are all those (c) and ™’s on their site compatible with the Wiki spirit? A ™ on searchme…for a search button/box?? Seems like a ™ on “chair” to me…
When we started our human-edited search engine Bessed in October, we considered the wiki model in order to get people involved and also because we were told by investors that without a lot of user involvement our site wouldn’t scale.
They may prove to be right, but we just couldn’t see going the wiki route because there is just so much motivation to edit it to put your own site on top for anything and everything. Someone could put their Vermont ice cream store on top for a search on “business” for example. Others might make changes to police some of that, but what is their motivation to do so over the long haul?
The downside for us is that to do it right, you need a lot of paid people to do the editing of results while you try to bring in user involvement as much as possible (without giving up control completely). Bessed is offering the user involvement via on-page commenting, but rounding up 100 editors and finding a way to pay them is proving to be a bit more difficult. All in all, however, it feels like the only way to effectively do human-powered search.
We’ll soldier on, but not with the wiki route. Can’t wait to see the future of wikiseek and Jimmy Wales’ search engine project.
I just don’t see the appeal to this. If I want to search wikipedia for something, I can use their search box and usually what I want is the first or second result. If I want to search more than just wikipedia, then I hit google, which frequently has wikipedia results in the top 10 anyways. I really just dont see why anyone would want to use this. Someone tell me.
This is never going to take off. You’re going to have people pushing their sites to the top, rewriting what pops up about competitors, and people spamming all over the shop.
Like someone said, humans have no integrity. And unfortunately, the dollar bill is all these days, doubly so online.
Google has nothing to worry about
What exactly is stopping someone from changing all the TechCrunch search results to point his/her own site, thus stealing a fair amount of traffic right now? I’m not going to do it. Someone will (;.
VIACOM IS SUING YOUTUBE FOR 1 BILLION
I’m an italian reader, I often visit your site to read your news.
Friday morning I published latest version of IusVision.com , a search engine managed directly by user.
You browse the web, you take notes with the toolbar, and datas are collected in different ways.
An abuse /antispam system is on line, and works in two ways: Urgents, and featured.
Urgent alert can be sent by phone or better fax. This is usually preferred solutions for citizens or consultants.
Featured alert are sent by user with an account. This is the most uncompleted solution and we are developing an internal solution.
IusVision.com is actually in italian. I’m working on european version with something more interesting, because now it’s only for italian lawyers.
Regarding copyright there’s a simple solution: i can read all my notes. I can read notes taken by others, but only for 150 characters. It’s fair use, also in Italy.
I like to check out spam links on this web. So, I can copy their source code for free.
Most spam websites don’t have actual copyright register.
HAHAHAHAH. I love left click and read their source codes and save it…. Better luck next time spammers!!!
I love your javascripts! I will take it without credit your work.
Wikiseek’s features for adding, reordering and deleting search results have a lot of potential to outdo Google search results in qualitative terms, by making search more interactive and results more relevant.
While tag-based approaches like del.icio.us have done a good job filtering spam, the frequency-based results challenge the user to make the relevant ranking on her or his own.
If Wikiseek can combine the tag-based approach with easy, new add/reorder/delete features, Wikiseek could offer a very compelling search alternative.
Any one here of TallStreet.com? Kinda the same thing.
http://NosyJoe.com will beat them all, hihi, but when it launches I guess (my apologies to the guys from NosyJoe for the little joke, but the name is really good choice for a social search engine, was really provocative to mention here)
More seriously, WikiSeek appears to me as niche-specific search engine with limited reach rather than anything close to generic ones like Google for example…, yet it has its own role (chance) in the very crowded search engine market, Google owns 99% of the market and all the rest small even smart start-ups own the rest, for now…
What is interesting fact is that start up search engines are raising upon us on daily basis, way more than the time Google launched and established itself as leader, which is a little indication about the fact that it is all about time for change… best of luck to all involved.