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Wikipedia’s ‘increasing focus on quality and referencing’

paulabowles — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:02:45 +0000

by paulabowles

Many lecturers and teachers will recognise the feeling of disheartenment when confronted by an undergraduate essay containing multiple references to Wikipedia. Despite regular exhortations for students to resist its charms, its appeal seems almost overwhelming. Although the site is loved by many, its major selling point of completely open access (i.e. ‘anyone can contribute to or edit’ its entries) is precisely why academics shake their heads in frustration.

However, in a recent interview with Emma Barnett of The Telegraph, Jimmy Wales (co-founder) appears to suggest that things are about to change at Wikipedia. Most noticeable is the creation of new measures, described as “flagged revisions”. In essence, this will mean that all new submissions and edited content, which relate to a living person, will have to be authenticated by one of Wikipedia’s editors, prior to online publication. Despite criticism that the whole ethos of the Wikipedia site will be degraded by the introduction of pre-publication censorship, Wales is convinced that this is the way forward. He points to a slowing of growth amongst new articles on the English version, suggesting that contributors are now concentrating on ensuring the articles already available are accurate, rather than simply adding more and more new material.

Whether the promise of ‘an increasing focus on quality and referencing’ will be able to sway the academic community, remains to be seen. However, the sheer volume of information and the speed with which it is checked and uploaded, makes it unlikely that Wikipedia is anywhere near reaching the stringent standards required for academia and education.

Allison Cavanagh on ‘From Culture to Connection: Internet Community Studies’

What is Social Search?

Sundar Kadayam — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:52:57 +0000

It is hot! So hot that Google legitimized it with their recent update. Buzz is building on social search like never before, as this handy trend graph from BlogPulse indicates:

But what is social search?

According to different industry voices, social search …

“… involves combining social graph information with pure algorithmic search results.“

“… combines traditional algorithm-driven technology with online community filtering.“

“… helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle.“

“… is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment.“

These definitions are quite broad and varying, and the result is that so many solutions have come under the banner of “social search”. However, one thing common across these diverse set of tools and services is this: they’ve all used collective intelligence (wisdom of the crowds, if you will) in some way to improve what they present to users in the search process.

Here are some that come to my mind:

In the early days of the Internet, DirectHit (later acquired by Ask Jeeves) watched which links users clicked through more for a given search and used that data for dynamically ranking search results based on their popularity with the community of users.
Amazon has been a pioneer in the space of using social/community data to improve the searches for users on Amazon.com – much has been written about their recommendation engine!
Intelliseek’s ProFusion.com engine ( a product I helped design) used an adaptive search mechanism (community usage driven) to determine what are the best sources to pick for a given query in a distributed / federated search environment.
Wikia Search used the Wikipedia model of direct, swarm-editing of search result pages for different queries. i.e. Wikia Search users could interactively change the results on any result page, and impact what other users saw directly.
In reality, Google has always been a social search engine, in a couple of ways. They’ve always tracked what people have liked through who / what they hyperlink to – a core to their famed PageRank algorithm. In the recent years, they’ve also included user and community contributions (in the form of social media) into their search results, with content from Wikipedia and the blogosphere impacting search results in a noticeable way.
Yahoo has tried integration of Delicious (their social bookmarking system) into the search results.
Presently, the buzz is all about including social network data and data from popular social tools like Twitter into the search results. Bing did it. Now Google is doing it too!

My company, Zakta, is also a recent entrant in “social search”, and we refer to Zakta as a personal and social Web search engine. Our aim is to improve informational searches on the Web.What prompted me to write this post was the recent Google announcement on social search. Our small community of users felt that Google was encroaching on Zakta’s turf, and I thought I should help clarify where Zakta fits.

First, Zakta has no turf – Google dominates all Second, we are trying to add value to the informational search experience of users through a comprehensive solution framework, so we don’t get into feature battles with giants that we don’t have a chance of surviving (as it is, I’ve been called “Nuts!” to start Zakta at this time, and having my tiny company enter into a feature race with the giants should surely bring me the label “Stupid” too – something I’d very much like to avoid!).

Here’s a personal framework that I’ve used to understand the social search space myself and to steer the design and development of Zakta.

On the X-axis, I plot the Personal (focus is on the individual) versus Communal (focus is on the community as a whole) continuum. On the Y-axis, I plot the nature of information that users interact with, in terms of whether it is Disorganized (focus has been on mere collection of information) versus Organized (focus is on curation of digital information).

Using this framework, I’ve mapped a handful of social search services and tools that I’m somewhat familiar with. So, admittedly, both this framework and my characterization of these services in this framework are based on my personal viewpoint. I’d welcome comments for improvement, or other viewpoints. I hope you find this framework a useful tool to make sense of what is happening with this growing space that is simply called “social search”.

Now I can put Zakta into this context. As portrayed in this framework, Zakta is a personal Web search engine because it provides tools to deliver a personal search engine experience that puts the searcher in control.

Zakta is also a social Web search engine in many distinct ways:

It enables a searcher to collaborate with people they trust to find, collect, organize and share information on topics of interest
It enables a searcher to connect to others they trust and discover information relevant to their interests from the recommendations made by their trust-network
It enables a searcher to benefit from the contributions of the community of Web users in the form of published Zakta Guides on topics of interest
It enables a searcher to gain from the ongoing relevance ranking improvements that happen behind the scenes that take into account the signals of recommendation expressed by not only the user’s trust-network, but also the community as a whole not just on Zakta, but elsewhere on the Web

As you can see, Zakta is not as much about finding what your social network has been saying. Rather it is all about empowering you personally and helping you benefit from your trusted network as well as the community at large to improve your own Web search experience and discover useful information on an ongoing basis on topics of your interest.

As always, I’d love to get your feedback!

Wales dijo adiós a Wikia Search

sitecla — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:48:24 +0000

Wikia Search fue el proyecto con el que Wales llevaba a las buscadores a otro nivel, donde el usuari

Mídia Digital Wikia Search, de Jimmy Wales, fecha após perder briga com o Google

ldtechnology — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:36:07 +0000

O Wikia Search, a tentativa de Jimmy Wales de desafiar o Google em buscas online no longo prazo, será fechado nesta terça-feira (31/03).

Wales, o fundador da Wikipedia, fez o anúncio em seu blog, afirmando que o Wikia Search, lançada em janeiro de 2008, falhou em atingir os níveis de popularidade necessários para ser alavancado financeiramente.

“Em uma economia diferente, continuaríamos a gastar dinheiro com o Wikia Search sem prazo definido. É algo que qual eu sinto profundamente. Eu voltarei de novo e de novo em minha carreira à busca, seja como investidor, contribuinte, doador ou entusiasta”, escreveu.

“Mas agora, fecharemos as portas do projeto Wikia Search em 31 de março e redirecionaremos nossos recursos em outras propriedades da Wikia.com”, acrescentou.

Lançada há pouco mais de um ano, a Wikia Search apostava em uma abordagem aberta e pública por trás da ferramenta de busca.

Qualquer um poderia adicionar, deletar ou classificar páginas no índex do buscador, além de permitir que desenvolvedores criassem aplicativos.

O Wikia Search era um projeto da Wikia, empresa comercial fundada por Wales especializada em projetos corporativos de colaboração.

Wales também está por trás da Wikimedia Foundation, responsável pela enciclopédia online Wikipedia.

Pouco mais de seis meses após seu lançamento, o Wikia Seach atingia uma participação irrisória no mercado de buscas, com 0,000079% do setor nos Estados Unidos, segundo dados da Hitwise.

Fonte: IDGnow

Otro fracaso más de la cancamusa 2.0

clondans — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:47:27 +0000

Wikia Search cierra, culpa de la crisis

Por Eduardo Arcos en: Economía y Empresas, Internet

De Wikia Search hemos escrito bastante y también hemos leídocríticas durísimas por parte de algunos blogs conocidos, aunque en su momento nosotros consideramos que eran críticas injustificadas por su estado en alpha. Lamentablemente el proyecto no ha logrado despegar y los avances con relación al buscador nunca llegaron.

Por lo tanto Jimmy Wales anuncia que el proyecto queda suspendido desde hoy, todos los esfuerzos, dinero y tiempo se re-enfocarán en Wikianswers, que ha tenido un crecimiento espectacular los últimos meses. Lo mismo en las redes de juegos y entretenimiento de Wikia que han incrementado su tráfico.

Hay que recordar que en algún momento Google hizo un movimiento para competir contra buscadores como Wikia Search por medio de SearchWiki que permite personalizar resultados de las búsquedas.

Aún así, yo siempre he considerado que practicamente cualquier proyecto en el cual Jimmy Wales se involucra tendrá éxito. Creo que es una persona que realmente entiende la forma en que las personas se comportan en internet y que sabe como hacer cosas que le sirven de verdad a la gente. Ojalá en algún momento vuelta a intentarlo con las búsquedas en internet.

Afortunadamente sigue quedando algo de cordura en la economía y las finanzas, y esta deficitaria empresa se ha visto obligada a cerrar. Por supuesto, nos hacemos eco de ello porque en España la envidia habría impedido que una iniciativa tan novedosa hubiera prosperado.

Search … and destroy? Nah.

Phillip Nones — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:25:54 +0000

New statistics published earlier this month by Hitwise show that Google continues merrily on its way to even greater heights of dominance in the search engine field. Despite the Don Quixote-like efforts of other search engines like MSN, Ask and Yahoo to take a run at Google’s position, the latest stats show that Google’s search engine is as popular as ever.

More popular, in fact. The numbers reveal that Google’s share of search activity has now risen to 72% versus 67% a year earlier, whereas the others continue to decline. Yahoo is in second position, but getting 21% of search share is about on par with H. Ross Perot’s vote percentage in the 1992 presidential election – all hat and no cattle.

More startlingly bad is MSN’s performance at around 7% of search activity, because they’ve been trying hard to make a dent in Google’s position. Keep on trying, gents. Maybe you’ll break 10% share before long, although I doubt it.

Does any of this come as a surprise? After all, people are creatures of habit. And when a habit gets as big as this, it’s really hard to break.

Also, most people typically take the path of least resistance. And when it comes to search, isn’t Google the easiest path? Simple visual layout … easy to use … robust results. What’s the point of going anywhere else?

UPDATE – 4/1/09 – As if on cue, another search engine bites the dust. Wikia has announced it is closing down its Wikia Search project. Introduced to great fanfare last year, Wikia was intended to be a user-generated, open search engine. The problem? Wikia Search was simply not generating any sort of worthwhile volume. In fact, traffic was running about 10,000 unique users per month. That’s just a blip on the screen — and certainly disappointing considering the success of other initiatives like Wikipedia and Wikia Answers. Further proof that to be first in cyberspace with a good idea and good execution is a huge advantage … and to be fourth or fifth is considerably more difficult, even fruitless.

Wikia Search, una alternativa al omnipresente Google

Thalskarth — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:42:17 +0000

Wikia Search es el buscador desarrollado por la misma gente que desarrolla la Wikipedia y al igual que con ésta, su rostro más visible es Jimmy Wales.

En sí, y a diferencia de los otros buscadores, Wikia Search se basa en el desarrollo comunitaria por lo que los usuarios pueden agregar resultados, votarlos, etc… a fin de así ir refinando cada vez más el motor de busqueda.

Lo he estado usando recientemente y debo decir que me ha gustado bastante. es rápido al buscar y los resultados que he obtenido han sido satisfactorios.

Lo unico negativo que debo decir es la página inicial tarde en cargar un poco y que su dirección no es tan simple de memorizar como la de google o yahoo, aunque tampoco es tan complicada.

Enlace: Wikia Search

PD: En muchos sitios leí que wikia Search era libre y/o software libre. Pero no pude comprobarlo fehacientemente. Ssi alguno sabe si el dato es cierto, agradesco la ayuda.

Wiki founder to break Google Search Engine's Stranglehold

seshdotcom — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:44:22 +0000

Will Jimmy make it happen???

Jimmy Wales–The Famous Wiki Founder hopes that wikia search—A Project that he Spearheads,will break Google’s domination as the world’s most widely used internet search engine.Google and fellow behemoths Yahoo and Microsoft dominate the internet search engine market which wales said was causing some worry among web users in one of the interview to a Pressman he said “Right now in the US in Particular we have a really strong concentration of Industry”.And he pointed out some Statistics that over 90% of the searches in the US are done through three firms(THE YAHOO,THE MSN,THE GOOGLE) so a lot of people are really concerned about this,the people feel that Do we really want all our editorial control of the internet all being piped and ripped through one or two or three companies–What if they are down on a day ???Certainly not!!!!.

About Wikia Search:

Wales said that Wikia Search will run on a open Platform and follows the same principle like Wikipedia and he Quoted that “All of the existing search engines are proprietary Black Boxes”,—You don’t know how things are ranked but this is not going to be the case with wikia search you can get some meaningful answers for your Queries..

I am sure that Jimmy is a Determined Guy and will make it happen—->Lets c how the pages,the Brins,the yangs are going to handle this….

SearchWiki no es Wikia Search

IUS — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 23:26:43 +0000

Después de ver un poco más sobre SearchWiki y algunos de los posts en español sobre el tema, como: G

Microsoft U Rank

Jason Adams — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:02:08 +0000

Microsoft just announced a research project called U Rank, which aims to do pretty much just that. You rank search results, share with friends, blah blah blah. Basically it’s Mahalo with Microsoft branding plus a few trinkets. And it’s backed by Live Search so you can feel confident the baseline results will be easy to beat. According to their website, here are some of the things you might do with U Rank:

Organize and annotate results: write notes to summarize important information under each URL
Lists: keep lists while you’re researching
Collaboration: Share URLs with friends
Recommendations: Tell your friends what you like
Multimedia results: Mix video and images with web results for added context
Ego-boosting: Make sure your home page is #1 (at least for you and your friends)
Easy to explore what your friends are sharing
Short-cuts: Move your favorite sites up; then put an ! in front of the query and go straight to the top result

The first two are great and are obviously missing from other services like Google, though Google has means of achieving those things other than their main search product (e.g. Google Bookmarks and Google Notebook). Mixing in video and multimedia content is ok, I reckon. Doing it manually, though? Meh. The last one is probably useless. It will be fun for the first couple days and then you’ll return to using bookmarks or whatever you do already to keep track of favorite sites.

The rest of the features are social networking junk. The third is somewhat useful, but when you want to share something with friends, you normally want to push it on them and make sure they get it. So you IM them the link or email it to them. I’m not sure any link I’ve shared on a website or in Google Reader has ever been viewed by anyone else. The fourth one is no different than sharing the link in my mind. I wonder what the use case for that is. If it’s automated recommendations, that might be cool, though I’ve never seen it done well except for on StumbleUpon, and that’s more because the UI makes it easy to ignore bad recommendations.

Like Mahalo and Wikia Search, the main features require critical mass in community size. What good is sharing crap with my friends if none of my friends use U Rank? And ego-boosting is a fun toy for about 2 minutes until you realize it’s just information masturbation.

“Hey, ma, I’m number one in the search results! Look at it on your computer.”
“You’re still on page 16 for me, dear.”

And yes, I’ve done it. Just search for “mendicant bug” on Wikia.

So minus critical mass, U Rank is Live Search with window dressing and some annotation tools. The annotation tools will probably be worth checking out, but will it be enough to lure me away from the trusted Googles? I highly doubt it.

I’m just not sold on this whole user-driven search idea. With web search you are searching a ginormous collection of transient documents. Human annotation can’t keep up with it. That’s the whole point! In order for it to, you’d need a lot of people using the service, and you’re just not going to get that. As it stands right now, Google gets about 60% of the market share for searches. Yahoo comes in a very distant second with about 20% and the rest are floating at under 10%. Mahalo and friends get less than 3% of the search engine market share to divy up amongst themselves. Is that enough to provide meaningful results? Jason Calacanis might think so, but I’m skeptical.

Other Search Engines Are Available: More Google Alternatives

markcarter — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:28:45 +0000

In our previous post, this blog looked at the high profile launch of Cuil, the latest search engine

Disfruta de Wikipedia, Wikibooks y Wikinews totalmente offline

galdos21 — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:11:29 +0000

WikiTaxi, es un pograma que nos permite tener Wikipedia de forma offline, y esto funciona mediante copias de seguridad de la wikipedia, proporcionando ademas un explorador muy funcional. Funciona descargando la copia de seguridad de artículo del idioma seleccionado de Wikipedia e Importando dicha copia de seguridad en Wikitaxi. Esta aplicacion no es solamente compatible con la wikipedia, si no también con otras sitios como ser: Wikibooks o Wikinews.

Esta aplicación, no incluye las imagenes de los articulos para que ocupe menos en nuestra memoria, ya que si incluyera estas, podría llegar a ocupar 8 gigabytes.

Si te interesa este programa, puedes descargarlo desde aqui.

Una vez descargado, habrá que descargar el backup de wikipedia y lo podremos abrir con WikiTaxi. Si quereis la copia de seguridad en castellano el enlace es este.

Después, iniciamos el importador haciendo clic en el archivo WikiTaxi_Importer.EXE; seleccionas la copia de seguridad a descargada (lo que quiere decir que primero descargas la copia de seguridad y le pones el nombre que tendra ya convertida (tendra la extension .taxi). También es posible asignar RAM adicional para el proceso (para acelerar el proceso).

Terminada la importación se puede cargar el índice de artículo recién creado en la aplicación principal. Esto puede hacerse automáticamente con el comando WikiTaxi.exe ruta (directorio de ubiccion)–nombre de archivo convertido, es decir:

WikiTaxi.exe C:\directoriodebackup\simplewiki.taxiLa interfaz del programa es la de un explorador básico, conteniendo lo esencial pero sin dejar de perder funcionalidad. Para bucar un articulo simplemente escribes una frase en el campo de búsqueda para cargar los artículos sobre el tema. Todos los enlaces internos son redireccionan a otros artículos del mismo índice.

Fundador de Wikipedia confía en que su buscador desbancará a Google

tydw — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:31:21 +0000

Jimmy Wales criticó la fuerte concentración de la industria. Wikia Search es un servicio que permite que los usuarios optimicen los resultados.

El fundador de la Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, lanzó un aviso a Google y a los buscadores más utilizados como Yahoo!. Afirmó que que su oligopolio tiene los días contados gracias a Wikia Search, un buscador diseñado a la imagen y semejanza de la Wikipedia.

Estas declaraciones se realizaron en el Global Brand Forum en Singapur, donde Wales se mostró convencido que se producirá un cambio del panorama de los buscadores en internet. Según su opinión, “sufrimos una concentración realmente fuerte de la industria”.

“Se ha mostrado que mucha gente está preocupada por ello, ¿realmente queremos que todo nuestro tráfico, todo nuestro control editorial de Internet pase por una, dos o tres compañías?”, se preguntó.

Wales hizo hincapié sobre todo en que los buscadores que actualmente dominan el panorama son entornos cerrados, no ofrecen información de cómo categorizan los resultados de las búsquedas. “No tienes idea de cómo se categorizan las cosas y qué está sucediendo”, dijo Wales.

Cree que el éxito de las iniciativas comunitarias y abiertas está asegurado frente a servicios cerrados porque los usuarios cada vez están más preocupados por quién maneja la información en Internet y quién puede disponer de sus datos personales, como sus hábitos de búsqueda.

“Wikia Search” es un servicio que permite al usuario añadir más enlaces a los resultados de las búsquedas, la posibilidad de asociar otros términos que el usuario crea que tienen relación y otras herramientas que están en manos de la comunidad Wikia.

More Competition for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft

elilucas — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:45:30 +0000

At Onsite Computer Services in New Orleans we believe competition in any industry benefits consumers, especially in the search engine business. In most industries, the thought of 90% market share controlled by three firms like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft generally triggers opportunity alarms for entrepreneurs.

Considering the ~50 search engines presently available for use, vis-à-vis the ~78% market share enjoyed by Google, one may conclude there is a problem with the search technology employed by Google’s competitors. Google KNOWS the search engine industry is ripe for competition. In a defensive move to prevent a Microsoft – Yahoo deal, Google entered into a partnership with Yahoo. The 12% market share enjoyed by Yahoo is generally considered paltry for the number two competitor in any industry.

Microsoft, considered by many as technology’s ‘entrepreneur of entrepreneurs’, hears the alarm for opportunity. Microsoft identified problems with its search engine and unsuccessfully tried to spend $44 Billion to purchase Yahoo’s search engine technology earlier this year. In lieu of the Microsoft – Yahoo deal to enhance its search engine, Microsoft decided to proceed in another direction and reorganize its Platform and Services Division (PSD). Microsoft eliminated the president of its PSD and is completely reorganizing the unit.

Two ex-Google employees hear the entrepreneur’s opportunity alarm and recently introduced the search engine Cuil. Many tested the new entrant to the search war and the general consensus is Cuil’s results are not as reliable or as pertinent as Microsoft’s Live search results. One might easily surmise Cuil is not ready for competitive searching at this time. Cuil is new and probably requires some tweaking.

Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales is one of the latest entrepreneurs to hear the opportunity alarm in the search business. Mr. Wales leads the project Wikia Search and his objective is to break Google’s supremacy of the world’s search engines. Wikia’s distinctive competency among search engines is its open source, just like Wikipedia. Wikia Search wants users to participate as they use the search engine. All of the other search engines use secret algorithms to reap their results and users have little idea of how results are gathered or ranked.

Using Internet search engines is an important activity to most PC users. Google is a wonderful product; however Business Strat 101 teaches that if one firm holds 78% market share in any industry, than that industry is attractive for competition. Stay tuned as the participants in this industry respond to competition for the benefit of consumers.

If you’re searching for New Orleans computer service or repair of your Microsoft based system or network, then call the Microsoft specialists at 504-469-6991. Onsite Computer Services, Inc. in New Orleans

You may also be interested in Onsite Computer’s Blog.

This New Orleans On-Site Computer Service post was provided by Eli Lucas. Eli can be reached at eli@onsitenola.com. Onsite Computer serves the Microsoft computing needs of small businesses throughout the Greater New Orleans area including Uptown, Lakeview, Broadmoor, Mid-City, Metairie, Jefferson, Kenner, Westbank, French Quarter, and the Warehouse District. Please visit our website for New Orleans Computer Service.

Fundador de Wikipedia pretende romper a Google en pedazos

Emmanuel Roberto — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:11:00 +0000

El fundador de Wikipedia Jimmy Wales espera que Wikia Search, un proyecto que él mismo encabeza, pue

Wikia Search Has Already Met Digg and Customizing

Anders — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:13:29 +0000

So, while Google has been working on its version of an open-source Web search engine, Wikia’s been letting users play around with theirs for a few months now. I remember hearing about this at the beginning of the year and thinking, now what the hell is that good for? and not spending any time on it. I just didn’t think that people were going to appreciate or use a search engine that was partially user defined. Sure, throw an algorithm and a logarithm and a biorhythm in there, but if someone can still add “This site sucks” as a comment on a search engine listing… Well, then… objectivity? Hello?

At the time, I thought of it like this: Imagine in the days of big-ass phone books (let’s pretend that those days are far behind us, it just feels nice to do so…) if every single company were to print their own version of the book… Imagine opening up the Domino’s Pizza Yellow Pages and finding a lot of highly rated entries for Domino’s Pizza under the heading “pizza,” and very few, if any, listings for other pizza places. Well, what would be the fracking point of that? Um, yeah, hey, Domino’s? Yeah, I’d, um, hey, like to place an order… Well, THAT would be the point of that.

But I have wisened up (albeit ever so slightly) and am now thinking of it like this: Imagine that there is just one big-ass phone book, and everybody has to share it, pass it around, and can pencil in (ink would be strongly discouraged) their favorite pizza places and place less relative pizza listings (like those that list pizza restaurant supplies, for instance) lower down on the significance scale. That would mean that the Domino’s Pizza listing would only make it to the top of the list if enough people moved it up there. And there you have it: open-source pizza. Or something like that.

So now I think I’m starting to really see the point with open-source Web search engines–you get search results that have some comments and some user input, along with your own customizations… Okay, uncle, uncle… Sounds like a pretty good deal.

So after watching the video to see what the Google version is apparently going to be all about, I decided to have a go at Wikia Search. Comparing two cars without driving one of them is pointless, but I knew that playing around with Wikia Search would give me an idea of what both versions are basically all about. Though this blog entry written by Jim Wales (creator of Wikipedia) does want to make the point that the Wikia version has what Google has and then some:

So let’s see:

- Rating entries? Got that.
- Deleting results? Yup.
- Adding comments? Uh-huh.

That’s really all they added. What about

- Adding search results? We can do that.
- The super-cool annotation tool
- And all the other stuff?

So, I played around with the Wikia Search for a while, and it was pretty cool. I started by searching for “sweden weather,” mostly to find out if it is going to rain today, because if so I can call off the BBQ and stay inside and go around tagging the walls of the Internet. The results came up showing some sort of Swedish rock band first, then a Wikipedia entry on Sweden, and then some weather forecasting sites. You can see that here. (Click on the images to go to the large versions on Flickr.)

Okay, so I don’t need The International Noise Conspiracy to lead off my search results about Swedish weather, so I deleted that listing. (I, of course, now feel bad for deleting them and so am linking to them here, a much better place for a link to them than in a “swedish weather” search.) Then I added a listing that didn’t come up, which is the one that I use all the time–SMHI–which is the Swedish Meteorological Institute. After it was added and went to the top of the list, I even added a little comment about it, gave it a 5-star rating and then highlighted it, since I believe that it is the most accurate weather forecasting site for Sweden. And that looked like this:

So all of this is pretty darned interesting and it does look like this is the way Web-searching will be heading in the future, though there is much to learn and lots that I am very unclear about.

I still, for example, do not know if it is going to rain today–but that is no fault of either Wikia or Google. I’m just a numbskull.

Read more about Wikia Search and try it out, if you are so inclined.

Wikia Search será lanzado en diciembre

galdos21 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:07:13 +0000

Wikia Search, el nuevo buscador del que ya hablamos anteriormente, será lanzado definitivamente el próximo diciembre, informa el diario ‘The Times’.

Según Jimmy Wales, fundador de la enciclopedia electrónica Wikipedia, Wikia competirá en menos de tres años con los principales buscadores de Internet, como Google —que copa la mayoría del mercado en el mundo— y Yahoo!.

Al contrario de los algoritmos que usan los buscadores actuales para clasificar los sitios web, que establecen un orden de prioridad de resultados según la frecuencia de los enlaces, Wikia se basará en las opiniones de los usuarios para ordenar los resultados de una búsqueda.

Wales asegura que los seres humanos son mejores que los ordenadores para dar una “opinión editorial” sobre qué sitios web son más relevantes para una determinada búsqueda.

“Una de las tareas básicas de un buscador es tomar una decisión: ‘Esta página es buena, esta página es una basura’. Se sabe que los ordenadores son malos para opinar sobre eso, de modo que la búsqueda algorítmica tiene que hacerse de forma indirecta”, explica Wales, presidente emérito de la Fundación Wikipedia.

Según él, la clave está en construir una comunidad de usuarios de confianza que valoren las páginas, ya que “saber si una página es buena sólo lleva un segundo”.

Wikia, al contrario que Wikipedia, enciclopedia gratuita sin ánimo de lucro con 8,2 millones de entradas, tiene como objetivo obtener ingresos vendiendo publicidad que aparecerá en las páginas de resultados.

De momento, Wales ha recibido apoyo financiero de Omidyar Network, una organización creada por Pierre Omidyar, fundador de la casa de subastas por Internet eBay.

Según Wales, los usuarios no rechazarán apoyar un proyecto que busca beneficios porque es “divertido compartir conocimientos” y porque querrán reducir el poder de los gigantes Google y Yahoo!.

Wikia search and Wordle

wecanchangetheworld — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:10:31 +0000

They say (whoever they are) you should stick to a single topic per post, but I don’t always follow the rules. Sometimes things relate enough in my mind that I make a post into a related links post, other times it just occurs to me that a couple of things I’ve run across recently I should make a note of, but I can’t see a really good reason for two notes when one will suffice. This post is an example of the latter case. First up, Wikia search:

Somebody landed on my blog using Wikia search, which I’d never seen before. So, curious, I paid it a visit.

Here’s a quote from their about page…

Our Principles
Wikia Search has four organizational principles: Transparency, Community, Privacy, and Quality

which they go on to describe in detail. Here’s a quote from their Crawl the Web page

Wikia Search uses a distributed web service called “Grub” to crawl the web. Grub was started back in 2000 with the mission of using a team of volunteers from around the world to crawl every website, every day, in order to build the most up-to-date search results possible. To further this goal and the goals of the Search Wikia project, Wikia acquired Grub from LookSmart in July of 2007. Like all other code used on Wikia Search, Grub is available under the BSD License.

Users are developing a “whitelist“, described as follows:

This is a list of sites that the community considers to be prime “must have” sites for the first crawl of the web. We are aiming for around 35 million URLs in the first index, which is of course very small (more to come soon of course!). This is a list of URLs (and notes about each of them) that should evolve to be a generally accepted consensus of a good starting point of sites that should be deep crawled and included.

So, basically it looks like it is a search engine which falls somewhere between stumbleupon, digg and wikipedia… an interesting idea, if nothing else. Perhaps a valuable new search engine at some stage…

Wordle- Beautiful Word Clouds
I ran across this colorful tag cloud forming site through (wouldn’t you know it) tag surfing on wordpress. Pretty cool results, I think.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Wikia wird Mitmach-Suchmaschine

hhuduesseldorf — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:07:49 +0000

Quelle: netzeitung.de

05.06.2008