Wikiasari: Search Engine of the Future, or every Black Hat SEO's dream come true?
Posted by Steve Janke of the Blogging Tories at 03:14 PM
A new search engine is about to be launched. Unlike the top-down model of Google and Yahoo, Wikiasari is a community, bottom-up approach, in which the community of users build the engine.
It's an interesting idea. But what is that thundering noise? Every Black Hat SEO running, not walking, to start working Wikiasari over.
Jimmy Wales is aiming high:
The U.S. founder of the Web encyclopedia Wikipedia says his planned Internet search engine, Wikiasari, could rival Google and Yahoo!.
Jimmy Wales told The Times of London his search engine, planned to launch with Amazon.com, will use the same user-based technology as 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.
Wikiasari gets its name from "wiki," Hawaiian for "quick," and "asari," Japanese for "rummaging search."
Earlier this year Wales said he secured multimillion-dollar funding from Amazon.com and a separate cash infusion from a group of Silicon Valley financiers to finance Wikia projects.
Wikipedia, online since 2003, is written by thousands of contributors worldwide using free, open-source software. Wales said he wants to use the same network concept and free software to create his search engine.
We can learn more about Wikiasari from, where else, Wikipedia:
Wikiasari is a search engine which allows users to search the Internet using keywords. The search index is editable, and available under a free content licence.
A search engine is a program designed to help one access files stored on a computer, for example a public server on the World Wide Web. The search engine allows one to ask for media content meeting specific criteria (typically those containing a given word or phrase) and retrieving a list of files that match those criteria. Unlike an index document that organizes files in a predetermined way, a search engine looks for files only after the user has entered search criteria. (Read more at Wikipedia.)
Contrast with what Wikiasari is not.
And what Wikiasari is not:
Wikiasari is not...
A meta search engine. Lists of results from other search engines should not be added to the index.
An online shopping catalog. Simple lists of products should be added individually to the index.
A gateway to illegal content. No sites which are illegal under US law will be listed in Wikiasari's index.
The motivation for the new search engine is the opinion that the current search engines are broken:
Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.
Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack accountability, lack of transparency.
Here, we will change all that.
There have been some amazing projects in recent years which have matured now to the point that a new alternative is possible. Wikia is funding and supporting the development of something radically new.
Nutch and Lucene now provide the background infrastructure that we need to generate a new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms can not. Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search.
More from an interview with the Times of London:
Mr Wales, a 40-year-old former options trader, believes that, as the popularity of Google has grown, obvious flaws in its search engine technology have become apparent.
“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,” he said.
Spammers and commercial ventures are also learning how to manipulate Google’s computer-based search, he added.
Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans.
Google searches are conducted using an algorithm that calculates how many other websites are linked to a certain site, which in turn gives the material found by the search a ranking. Therefore, the first result in any Google search is the website that has the most links pointing to it.
“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.”
Mr Wales believes that the reputation already fostered by his Wikipedia community and the transparency of his technology will build sufficient trust in his search engine to bring in advertising revenue and make the Wikiasari venture profitable.
“The revenue model of search is advertising. Transparency in search, therefore, is like transparency in news. If the quality is there people will come.”
Now with literally billions of pages to index, it will be interesting to see if the Wiki model can work. One problem with the Wiki model is that it has pyramid of participation. Most of the entries are written by a small number of contributors. Also, with the massive amounts of money at stake in placing highky in search engine results pages, I wonder how the Wiki search engine will stop manipulation by commercial interests who would not blink an eye at spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire people to do nothing else but work on manipulating the rankings.
A whole new field for Black Hat SEO.
Is Google and Yahoo broken? I don't think so. I think they do a remarkable job of filtering out the spammy pages and other low content web sites. I know, because I work for a company that invests a lot of time and money creating high-quality content-rich websites. Geosign does this precisely because we know that Google and Yahoo are very efficient at ranking "crap" low on the SERPs.
On the other hand, Geosign websites are excellent sources of information, so I expect that we'd do well in a Wikiasari model, assuming Wales and his team can keep the Black Hats out of the picture.
Good luck with that.
[Mathew Ingram at the Globe and Mail comes to much the same conclusion. Nice idea. Lofty goals. Too harsh an opinion about Google. Probably won't work.]
