Now Wikipedia to Challenge Google, Yahoo in Search
For years now, Google and Yahoo have had a smooth run in the search engine space beating or acquiring rivals. Now they may face some competition from Wikipedia, one of the world’s largest viewed sites.
Jimmy Wales, he founder of Wikipedia says the Google-Yahoo rival named “Wikiasari” will be launched in early 2007.
Wikia, a for-profit corporation created by Wikipedia, will launch Wikiasari. It will leverage the same user-driven model that has contributed to the massive success of the Wikipedia. Wales says that Wikiasari will generate profit from the service with advertising.
Wikiasari—wiki, the Hawaiian word for 'quick' and 'asari', from the Japanese word for rummaging search— has investment backing from Amazon and others of over million in capital. Wales said Wikiasari would be based on human judgment rather than computer generated results. He also claimed that human judgment is better than computer algorithm-based searches that can be manipulated.
Wales says, “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.” Wales says he was prompted to launch the search engine sue to complaints about poor results from search engines. Eh said, "Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap."
However the question is can Wikipedia create success out of a search engine in the same way it did for its encyclopedia? Wales believes that the reputation of Wikipedia and the transparency of its approach will attract searchers. Another question is will the people accept a commercial, advertisement supported search engine from a website which boasts of surviving without advertisements and has stubbornly rejected advertisements to fund newer activities.
Although Wikipedia has generated a lot of interest from users for the secular nature of its articles, founder Wales says users should not take anything written in the site seriously. So this questions the authenticity of the user generated search results. This also means user generated results would include popular sites and not necessarily the relevant ones, which, in all likelihood, will be part and parcel of Wikiasiri.
Though Wikiasiri is an interesting concept, it remains to be seen how does it measure up to the goliaths in the search space with its user-generated results.
