We’ve waited more than a year for Wikia to launch their human powered search engine. The project was first announced in December last year by Wikipedia/Wikia founder Jimmy Wales. The promise was to return better results than Google and other search engines, using humans to make quality decisions:
“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.”
A lot has happened since that announcement. Mahalo, a Sequoia backed startup with their own approach to human powered search results, launched in May and is showing promising early growth. Meanwhile Google, perhaps somewhat annoyed by Wikia Search as well as Wikipedia’s ongoing refusal to add Google ads to their pages, announced Knol earlier this month - clearly a shot across the Wikipedia bow.
Not much on Wikia search, however. They’ve set up a page to discuss the project. In July Wikia announced the acquisition of Grub, which had technology to allow distributed web crawling by users. And an early screen shot, showing a Facebook-like profile page, was shown in South Africa in November.
Wikia Search In 2007 Or Not? Jimmy Wales Say Yes.
But the promise has been to launch Wikia Search this year, and time is fast running out. There’s just one week left in 2007.
Today a report was published that Wales, in an IRC chat, promised to make the end-of-year launch date: “
I asked Wikia CEO Gil Penchina if the quote was accurate and whether to expect a launch in the next few days. His response was “Can’t comment on exact timing.”
It won’t be important a year from now if Wikia Search launches this year or early next year. But it is time for the product to be judged on the merits of the search results created by it, not on a series of press leaks and hazy screen shots. I look forward to the launch, whether it be this year or (hopefully at the latest) next.
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When you strip the terminology off, what you search for are answers to your questions. For example, what are the best hotels in Tampa? These are not just “search terms”.
The information is out there, and is either accessible on the web or by reaching out to the right person. The winning approach for me, though I’m rather biased on this (click my name to find out why :-)), is that context based q&a can get the best answers to such questions.
This sounds so good
after Wikia IPO probably..
Sounds a lot like ChaCha.com — they started out recruiting Ivy League students as “Search Guides.” It looks like they ended up taking anyone who was willing to do the job. Try searching for anything slightly obscure and you’ll get useless guides who pass you on to more useless guides.
If Wikia is going to succeed, they’ll need to do better job at search training that ChaCha did.
i heard about a new website
http://www.wannago.com
it lets you search for people and events
and has a very good Social Engine..
you gotta check it out!!
Guy..
Anthony - it is far from fair to compare Wikia, or any other living breathing startup, to chacha.
May be Wikia will come someday and I am personally waiting to see it and wish its success. But google is very professional.
What about Megaglobe?
What happened to perpetual beta that was the method du jour not too long ago? You know, launch first, ask questions later?
Wikia should just launch their product, and if the underlying concept is any good, they’ll know soon enough.
Is private beta much better than not launching, especially in a rush to meet a self imposed deadline? I hope they launch public beta.
I hope wiki will do much better in search results.
Human powered search is a silly idea. Somebody paying people to index the web is just stupid. Sorry.
Traditional search, plus social search (like del.icio.us) have more future.
Sounds like another search startup….what are they called, Powerstart? Powersearch? No? PowerDeadpool? Until they launch something, no one is worth this much hype.
ChaCha for the win!
I can’t wait to see what sort of fallout happens in Google’s SERPs as this battle wages on. When Wikipedia has a “search powered by you” search box on it, will those pages still rank #1 in Google for everything under the sun?
“We’ve waited more than a year for Wikia to launch their human powered search engine. ”
Google could add a human factor into pagerank in like 5 seconds. They’ve already started with ratings.
Wikia’s success rests on Wikipedia and the reputation only. They are technically inferior to Google by several orders of magnitude, and this is closed source. The collective knoledge that made mediawiki great is not included.
Wiki do not have any article about Megaglobe, which is very weird to me. Did they do it on purpose? Who knows. Anyway for them to not be updated like they are, I came to the same conclusion.
They are way overrated and it looks like the results and comments made on Wiki are protecting interests of “very few corporations”. Watch closer and you may see what I am talking about.
A lot has changed since that announcement. For example, when I search Tampa hotels on Google, I get very relevant results. They need to look for a new example of Google’s mediocrity.
“Human-powered search”
Why can’t people understand that Google *is* human-powered search?
That is the fundamental genius behind PageRank. Millions (billions?) of people with websites, and blogs, link to content that they find wortwhile, and add related text. They do this all for free. Plus, they have fun doing it!
Google realized that the NETwork part of InterNET meant that people were already labelling and stating what the best pages on the ‘net are anyway.
Yes, that’s right, *you* are working for Google. Every time you link to something in your blog, you are working for Google. More generally, since any search engine can use this information, you are helping everyone in the world find the quality pages more easily.
I love that I can Google some coding problem I have and then instantly find the most definitive solution to the problem decided upon (by linking on forums and blogs) by other people who have had the same problem. Moreover, Google ranks by authority score, so smarter people (who more other people think are smart) get more influence at deciding which pages are good and should be at the top of queries. Look up PageRank to see how that works.
*Paying* people to do the same thing would just be slower, painful, lower-quality (no authority score), and a waste of people’s talents.
“Why can’t people understand that Google *is* human-powered search?”
I have no problem with Google except that the only thing they give back to the FOSS community they admittedly took so much from is a coding contest sponsorship.
They’re no different than Microsoft, and they certainly aren’t as do no evil as Red Hat.
I am building an open source search engine w/social search as an extra using the pagerank algorithm and you’re invited to join me. http://www.peeplr.com
Why not build a common search engine and module db that we can ALL use, just like MediaWiki, and word press, then we can ALL make money selling keywords on searches?
I have most of the search engine part done. Just as Linux is bigger and better than Windows because of the world wide input, so can a community search engine. Google has what 15000 employees. About 1000000 people contribute to Linux. A GPL search engine like Mediawiki is the way to go, not Google.
Michael, why didn’t you comment on the relevancy of the search for “Tampa Hotels” on Google.
Did you execute the search? What do you find so irrelevant about it?
20,
Don’t make arguments from ignorance.
Google gives back incredible amounts to the community.
Scientific: Not only is the PageRank openly published, and other academics are building upon it, they have a massive research wing which practically pays whole CS departments to generate papers which advance. For example, MapReduce has revolutionized the way people think about how to approach massively parallelized processing.
Open Source:
Google’s Summer of Code is huge. It provides money directly to projects, it gets development work done for projects, it generates publicity for many open source projects, and it exposes lots of young bright students to open source. They’ve recently expanded the effort to even younger students with the Highly Open Participation Contest.
Google employs (pays the bills so that they can keep hacking on open source) a huge number of open source leaders such as Guido Van Rossum (Python) and Moolenaar (VIM).
The new Android is a huge step away from what every other mobile OS (Symbian, Palm OS, OS X, and hundreds of other weak proprietary os’s) offers in that it’s open source.
While the exact structure of their massive filesystems and databases are closed, they release massive amounts of improvements. For example, look up Google’s recent contribution to MySQL for huge performance-enhancements.
They *bought* Tesseract OCR, improved it, and release it as open source. It’s now the best open source OCR online today.
Not long ago, they released an improved version of malloc for C.
Google Web Toolkit, on which Google bases most of all its AJAX development, is completely open source.
Here’s a list of scores of other programs they’ve released: http://code.google.com/hosting/projects.html
Google Code is a nice, clean, simple way to get free project hosting for thousands of open source projects.
To say Google doesn’t contribute to the community is literally objectively ignorant.
FYI, documents from the Securities And Exchange Commission show that the Grub crawler was sold to Wikia for only $50,000.
Revealed: Wikia search bought “Grub” crawler for $50K
It turned out to be really poor technology in practice.
@ Q:
I posted a longer post about the idea of *human-powered* search here back in February: http://www.interactivedaily.co.....tup-ideas/
The basic reason that Pagerank is not completely foolproof is that quality is not simply the relevance of a result. People perceive quality through a variety of mechanisms including juding content, presentation, style, etc. Information is visually interpreted and then translated and certain ways to present information offer a better user experience and Pagerank doesn’t do a good job of figuring out how 2 results may share a similar relevance for answering a search query but have widly different experiences for users. If we can start rewarding sites for making sure they have relevant information AND quality presentation, writing, etc. then more power to Wikia.
Chris R, I disagree with you. Google hires the top ppl in the their respective fields. In software engineering, quantity does not beat quality. (Additionaly, for a search engine to be fast you need to put a lot of hardware & bandwidth under it, which, unlike o.s. developer’s time is not free.) Of course, if YOU, the lead developer, are a genius, then you can make a dent. To put it another way, if we’d set up a contest where John Carmack + 2 other id programmers went up against 30 o.s. programmers and they had 1 year to create a kick-ass 3D engine, who would you bet your money on? Even given that the o.s. team has 10x as many man-hours available, I’d put my money on id software.
@ #5 (Guy),
Shameless plug. Shame on you.
Timing is very important. Probably this is the the best time yet.
Try TallStreet.com
I have intervewed Jim Wales, the guy is an absolute genius. The success of wikipedia with very limited resources is amazing.
I think that Wikia is very exciting, when you search for something on wikipedia now you normally find very good external links at the bottom of the article. This sounds like an extention of that concept, with people voting (digg style) / editing the listings to get relevent information to the top. I am sure there will be a few issues, but it should hopefully become self governing like wikipedia is now.
I think I would use both google and wikia for searches, as the content should be relevant and also different on both sites.
I believe this is more of a risk to Yahoo etc, as googles algorithm makes sense, wikia’s concept makes sense. The other search engines methods seem a bit dated now.
Bad idea!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/
@Eric / 27 : You may be interested in my article:
“Inside, Wikipedia is more like a sweatshop than Santa’s workshop”
Jim Wales might be an absolute genius but Wikipedia is truly over rated and very poor.
Now let’s face it and read the comments of certain articles on Wikipedia, now YOU KNOW that there are some kind of manipulation.
They write junk articles about corporations or indivduals that they do not like and nice articles about their partners.
That kind of attittude should be illegal. I do not support that company.
Wikia is returning horrible results.
I think they placed to far a concentration on outdated and international websites. I’m trying to figure out how their linkage to all the wikis has allowed web surfers to surf more efficiently?
I will never use Wikia….ever!
Ali A. Akbar
aliakbar.net
thanks
thanks
Since Wales used “Tampa hotels” as a test case, I tried it on our system, SiteTruth.com. That’s a search with search clutter from bottom-feeders - “landing pages”, directory sites, referrers, and similar web spam. SiteTruth moves most of those down in search results by checking, automatically, “who’s behind this web site?” We do some basic tests for business legitimacy - the things law enforcement and consumer groups tell users to do. This filters out most of the bottom feeders.
SiteTruth is in open alpha test; try it.