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"Jimmy Wales, the man who created Wikipedia, is planning to enter into search engine market with the financial help from the biggest online retailer, Amazon.com. Wales? project, called Wikiasari, will use same user-based technology he perfected for Wikipedia.
The commercial version of the search engine will be developed through San Mateo, Calif.-based Wikia Inc., with a provisional launch planned for the first quarter of 2007, he said in an interview for The Times of London.
Wales believes that the human judgement is better than any computer search algorithm. ?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?,? Mr Wales said. ?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,? he added. ?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.?
The commercial version of the search engine will be developed through San Mateo, Calif.-based Wikia Inc., with a provisional launch planned for the first quarter of 2007, he said.
Finding different ways to improve the search techniques business was a hot topic during 2006. In November in their effort to better index the web sites Google, Yahoo and Microsoft decided to team up and use the same tool, called Sitemaps.
The tool, initially developed by Google, is a easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Sitemaps are especially important if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.
As for the user generated search engines, Google launched in October Google Custom Search Engine, which allows users to have control over what shows up in their search index.
The Google Custom Search Engine enables users to restrict searches to specific pages and websites, offering them the possibility to customize searches to their hearts? desire. They can choose which pages will be included in their search index, how the pages are arranged in order of priority and what the final page will look like. They can even decide if other users can contribute to the index. The user has total control over the search process. The big idea is to sift the relevant information from the irrelevant, in contrast to generic search engines that make no discriminations.
So, as you can see it won?t be a easy life for Wikiasari, but let?s see what Wales will unveil in 2007."
