[Search-l] What Is Wikia and How Real Is It?

[John McCormac]

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> You would get the same story lines about RedHat and Microsoft a few 
> years ago.  It's an interesting story, but has little relationship to 
> getting some work done.

Yes but Redhat had an active developer community and Microsoft had a 
near monopoly on the desktop market. Redhat has carved out a niche for 
itself and Microsoft is trying to diversify.

> The task at the moment for me is to design the social aspect of the 
> community part of the site.  The goal is to have good tools to allow the 
> community to control the crawl in intelligent ways.  This is not 
> Infinite Monkeys, and it has to deal with interesting questions about 
> self-interested editors, trust, etc.

So the social element will be developed first? That's probably the 
strongest aspect of Wikia since it may result in a better index.

> Well, we do have the luxury of being able to provide hardware and 
> bandwidth to the community.  So we don't have to cut corners in those 
> areas.

Yes but developers need specifications. Can you at least give us an 
indication as to the servers and bandwidth available?

> If you think you can go out on your own and build a proprietary search 
> engine that makes you money, go ahead.  If you think that you could find 

SE developers (those outside the big players) tend to think like that. 
Where they cannot compete with the big players at their level, they will 
identify niches and areas where the big players are weak and work 
accordingly.

> it useful to work with a broader community to leverage each others 
> talents so that in whatever you are doing (enterprise search? niche 
> search on the web? social search?), there is a chance for you to compete 
> with the big players on a much more level playing field, then come and 
> help us.

Working with a broader community would be nice. But what you have to 
understand is that we have to make a living. Therefore we might take the 
search business a bit more seriously when it comes to planning and 
implementation. Those of us who have survived in the business this long 
will have seen others, both friends and competitors, fall by the wayside 
and tend to be cynical when grandiose Google Killer claims are made. So 
you will have to forgive us if we ask so many questions. :)

Regards...jmcc
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