[Search-l] Fwd: 10 People Powered Search Engines

[Seth Ford]

But that is easy enough to change... First start with Mediawiki as the base
(open it up to edit everyone, but pay for content editors/guides), as they
did, but have yet to open it up. Add in a better internal search product
that can index the mediawiki database, like lucence (still looks like they
haven't done optimized it yet) which can take advantage of things like
popularity, categorization and time (vs. a stupid web based crawl). Then
mash it with something like a Google, if you prefer Grub fine... But knowing
how much time is spent on the index optimization and the fact that community
will carry the day at the end I think it's a bit pointless. Pointless from
the perspective that you can spend all of your money and time there and just
get a mediocre index having wasted a lot of money  vs. focusing on the
community first and  dropping in a search  provider after the fact. In 5
years with a strong enough community nobody is going to care who is taking
care of the long tail for you, the only thing they will care about is the
page rank algorithm that you internal search engine uses and that's easy
enough to give away as it should be open for discussion.

As for mahalo, I think they have the UI design for a community powered
search engine pretty close to being right. But you are correct, it isn't
interesting because it isn't open. I think that's all we are asking you guys
to do.
Seth

On 8/6/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> Seth Ford wrote:
> > Saw these articles
> > http://mashable.com/2007/06/01/10-people-powered-search-engines/  and
> > http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/04/BUGVCKTPOP1.DTL
> > I completely agree with Rob Enderle... "You can't build a better Google.
> > You have to approach this market differently". Personally I love the way
>
> > http://mahalo.com/ is tackling the problem... they just need a bit more
> > work. But the mashup for people powered wiki content and Google search
> > for the tail that doesn't exist is the right one.
>
> I agree with the general concept of "let humans do what humans do well,
> let computers do what computers do well" and I also think this roughly
> translates to "the head and the long tail"...
>
> But what Mahalo is doing is totally uninteresting to me because it is
> proprietary.  It doesn't change the structure of the industry.
>
>
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