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

[Seth Ford]

No offense but you design is all wrong. You have to take the approach of a
search based interface make it look and Feel like Google or Yahoo but the
content is editable. If you are looking for a half decent database based
search engine for mediawiki http://www.dbsight.net has one that is very very
easy to plug into mediawiki
http://www.dbsight.com/search.do?indexName=freedb&templateName=free&q=Hellofor
an example query. It's not quite Nutch but it will give you everything
you need to plug right in and create a easily configurable rage rank.
Although you can do this with Lucene, they just add a layer that makes it
very very easy to do. Like I said before Mahalo is as close as I have
seen... It's design is open and pleasing. It seems more and more that if the
first impression doesn't make you smile then it's probably not an app that
you are going to use (just my opinion there, but I feel I like I know the
sites and have the design skills to back it up).

I was thinking of registering http://nydse.com (Not Your Dads Search Engine)
and going after it, just can't seem to find the time and think that
contributing to an open source effort is more entertaining anyways.

On 8/6/07, Aerik Sylvan <aerik at thesylvans.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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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