SiteTruth is in open alpha test; try it.

I think they placed to far a concentration on outdated and international websites.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

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.

“Inside, Wikipedia is more like a sweatshop than Santa’s workshop”

fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

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.

Shameless plug. Shame on you.

I posted a longer post about the idea of *human-powered* search here back in February: http://www.inte.../startup-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.

Revealed: Wikia search bought “Grub” crawler for $50K

It turned out to be really poor technology in practice.

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.goo...g/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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?