[Search-l] Grub Update

[John McCormac]

(Replying to Seth Finkelstein's post which hasn't turned up here yet.)

"I suggest there's a path that Wikia Search doesn't have to
really be a "Google-killer" in order to be very profitable. All of
that is PR and sales-pitch, but it's not necessary for "success" as
defined in investment terms. That is, if Wikia ends up with a search
engine that's superior on the topics of computer hardware, comics,
anime, science fiction, Star Trek, Star Wars, and porn (reflecting
the interests of the demographic which will likely be contributing
intensively ...), though awful on everything else, that's still
probably worth a lot of money in targeted advertising sales."

That is Wikia's strength - a large group of micro-search engines rather 
than one huge, generic, search engine like Google etc. The investment 
and profitability angle might be iffy.

"So URL detection is partially solved by data-mining the Wikia
sites, or relying on people *in that group* to know of new good sites
for that *particular area*"

Mining Wikipedia or Wikia sites will only produce a very limited, though 
relatively high quality, set of sites. It will not solve the problem of 
near real-time website acquisition. It is really just repeating the 
process of using the Dmoz dump as a seed but with a dump of URLs from 
Wikipedia etc.

"What's so unusual here is that most small search startups
begin with technology, then try to get an audience. But this project
is the reverse, beginning with marketing, and trying to have the
*audience* build the technology and everything else."

I've seen search engine development by press release before. :) Most of 
those ventures never even made it to launch. Those that launched crashed 
ignominiously after failing to get an audience. Having the audience 
build the technology is somewhat innovative. Not so much an "if you 
build it they will come" approach but rather a "you build it and bring 
your own beer" one.

Open Sourcing the resultant data is a nice idea. It just isn't a killer 
app (to use the old dot.bomb terminology). The costs of bandwidth and 
storage have fallen but the search engine expertise pool has been 
heavily fished by the big search engines. Those that don't work for the 
larger search engines run their own small search engines.

The search engine business is highly competitive - moreso than it 
appears. While the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing is great, it would 
help if the crowd in question had more wisdom about the search business.

Regards...jmcc
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