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

[Aerik Sylvan]

On 8/6/07, Seth Ford <seth.ford at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But that is easy enough to change... First start with Mediawiki as the
> base


I did that two years ago!  http://wikidweb.com (or wikidirectory.org)

(open it up to edit everyone, but pay for content editors/guides), as they
> did, but have yet to open it up.


I've been considering paying an editor, since the community has been hit and
miss... seems like I get a flux of interested folks, then they fade.  But,
to pay editors, I have to either get some VC or monetize it... I've played
with getting sponsors, and may put up Adsense - hey, has anyone else been
cold-called by Google trying to get you to put Adsense on your site?  It was
a weired experience, I never heard that Google cold-called people.

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).


I'm working on this, actually.  I've been playing with zend_search_lucene,
which works, but doesn't seem to offer much performance over a MySQL
fulltext index.  So, next step, trying to compile a Clucene app (I don't
really know C++, just a little C in college, so there's quite a learning
curve for me).

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.


I'm actually hoping to build tail results from the directory by only
spidering the submitted websites... this may be completely inadequate, but
why be a front end for some other engine's results?  OTOH, participating in
a collective search endeavor is more interesting...

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.


Well, either Wikia will sprout an open alternative to Mahalo, or eventually
I'll get around to writing enough more code to play in that field :-)


Best Regards,
Aerik
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