[Search-l] The sites people bookmark

[Aerik Sylvan]

On 1/4/07, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> Yes, I think this is right.  I advocate something like a "whitelisting"
> spider, with the core community controlling the crawl.  (etc.)
>
> If you spider everything and then rely on the community to weed out the
> junk, that's a problem from two perspectives:
>
> First, the community has to look at a lot of junk to get rid of it,
> rather than looking at good stuff to include it.  Not very fun.
>

I don't know - I think any solution where we rely on the community to add
content will fail several tests of a "better search engine".  Here's where
I'm coming from:  I have been running a wiki based directory (general like
Dmoz, but structured like Wikipedia) for a couple years now (Jimmy, you
thought I'd get to be known as a porn site, but I've kept it family friendly
and of reasonable quality!).

It's working okay - I'm keeping the blatant spammers at bay and dozens of
sites that have at least some value are being listed daily.  But mostly they
have mediocre value.  They are there because the webmaster/SEO put them
there.  Any solution that requires manually added sites will suffer from
this kind of "watering down".  You may keep out the porn and splogs, but
we'll be overwhelmed with mediocrity.  (I'm condemning my own business model
a little here, and I've got very mixed feelings about that!).  Think about
what urls got listed (and by whom) in Wikia 2 years ago.

I think if we are going to build a search engine, we should go find the
pages!   Filter them for relevance to the best of our ability, and then let
out community do the rest.  Have you ever used Craiglist?  Seen their system
for flagging bad entries?
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/about/help/flags_and_community_moderation

I'm picturing a search engine that takes input in from the community.  We
can say "yeah, this search result is a pretty good match for my query"
(thumbs up, one vote, whatever), but I'm also picturing a system to vote
down spam ("flags").   (Disclosure:  I'm working on a combination
tagging/flagging social bookmarking service right now.)

Thoughts?

Aerik
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