Wikipedia creator into search engine biz?
Ok honestly saying, I didn’t saw it coming. Come on we are not talking about just anybody, we are talking about Jimmy Wales, who founded great thing like Wikipedia. Wikipedia the online encyclopedia has article on almost any topic under the sun (or you can think of). Now according to Times Online UK’s published article he is set to launch an Internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!.
The project has been dubbed Wikiasari and transitional(beta) release will be sometime in May-June, 2007. Wikiasari using same backbone that used by Wikipedia internal search. Wikipedia secured multi million-dollar funding from amazon.com earlier this year(2006), so it wouldn’t be their first handshake. Question is what Amazon will get out from this? Amazon already have two search engines (Alexa, A9), if Jimmy’s Wikiasari somewhat beat Google (which i doubt) then Amazon’s those search engines will be automatically busted. On the other hand Amazon can implement Wikiasari technology in their search engine, if it become successful.
According to Jimmy Google’s computer based algorithms are less effective/no match with human editorial judgment. Ok i agree with this one, but how he intend to put editorial glance to millions of sites across the net and also Human are prone to mistake? He gave a indication that, the “wikipedians” might be in use for these editorials. But considering the job at hand it will take a long time to flag each and every site on the net.
So i guess Wikiasari won’t be complete when it will launch on 2007. It will be rather be a directory rather then a search engine (in my opinion).
Source: Times Online UK
Wikipedia, Wikiasari, Jimmy Wales
