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

[Jimmy Wales]

Seth, I agree with you completely.  Design of the community aspect has 
to come first.  I think it is important to also have the crawl going 
contemporaneously, but there is no need to wait for one before the other. :)

Seth Ford wrote:
> 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 <mailto:jwales at wikia.com>> 
> wrote:
> 
>     Seth Ford wrote:
>     >  Saw these articles
>     >  http://mashable.com/2007/06/01/10-people-powered-search-engines/
>     <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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