Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is launching a new kind of search engine – one based not on algorithms, but on the power of human collaboration. “[Search] is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability [and] lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.”
Of course Wikia will be subject to the same games that spammers and SEO types play with conventional search results. As with Wikipedia, the quality of the results will be dependent on their being lots more good guys than bad guys monitoring and managing the content. But Wikipedia has shown that a helluvalotof people care; can and will pull together to make the model work.
Music: Robert Wyatt :: Shipbuilding
Well we already have dmoz, I don’t see the point in creating a new community.
Ludovic, DMOZ is a directory rather than a search engine. I guess we don’t yet know what kinds of technological approaches Wikia will use, but the DMOZ FAQ says:
“How is the ODP different from a search engine?
The ODP is a Web directory, not a search engine. Although we offer a search query, the purpose of the ODP is to list and categorize web sites. We do not rank, promote or optimize sites for search engines. The ODP is simply a data provider. ODP data users, such as AOL, Netscape and Google, install their own search functionality on their site. The ODP has no influence or knowledge on how these search engines process search queries.”