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

[Seth Ford]

Good point, no need to be single threaded. Maybe it's just the discussion
list, but it seems like there is entirely too much focus on search. :)
<slaps himself for joining a search based discussion list>. Anyways, having
a insight or two in how search is being done elsewhere.... the cost of
getting an index of to snuff with Google is a monumental (Don't want to be
piss in the keg and be the party crasher, because that's what everyone said
to Sergey and Larry back in the day) it can be done for sure, and rather
than paying communities to prune your index if you can bring the power of
wikipedia to the problem that will be something really special. I would just
look at it from a Cost Benefit Scale, a focus on doing search all over again
is rather expensive.... balance that with paying the Google or Yahoo Service
Tax.... I can't speak to it because I don't have the numbers. I mean it's
totally cool and all to redo, I often find myself rewriting code I wrote
three years ago, and how can you really trust those damn bastards anyways.
<Walks back to his day job, drinks the coolaid, smiles and stares at the
code again>

I think my point was don't invest in infrastructure when you can get is as a
service, maybe a distributed crawl sneaks you around the problem, as long as
it's not a downgrade like going from napster to p2p, because in the end it's
about speed of service, the less time people are on your search pages the
more money you will make and the more they will spend in your little
community (a counter intuitive play that Google made, people dismissed and
won the day).

You guys will do just fine thanks for taking the time,
Seth

On 8/6/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com > wrote:
>
> 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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