[Search-l] Why us?

[Terry J. Smith]

In response to the following: HYPERLINK
"http://lists.wikia.com/pipermail/search-l/2007-February/000260.html"http://
lists.wikia.com/pipermail/search-l/2007-February/000260.html

 

I agree with Aerik completely.  Before even beginning to think about
technology and scalability, from a business perspective we all need to
consider “What makes this search engine better than Google or the like?”,
and of course “How can we make this better than existing search engines?”.

 

The answer is of course: community.  YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace and other
social networking or user content based sites all have their foundations
(arguably for YouTube and piracy) in community.  The empowerment provided to
the users by giving them the abilities to rank their searches is what will
bring users to us; and that is of course the most widely advertised and the
biggest advantage that we have and we need to play on that: user powered
search.

 

To be completely honest, Google’s results are good.  But, they’re not great.
They are still littered with spam, “badware” sites, etc.  They may have the
experts, but hackers and SEO companies are finding new ways to break through
the Google algorithms every day and no amount of experts can stop that.
However, the same user base and ideology that powers Wikipedia can bring
this search engine to the forefront.  Thoughts?

 

Aerik’s question about collecting active user feedback is a good one.  While
I do like the idea of the posed question of “How well did the page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Presley fit your search for 'Elvis'?”, I
am inclined to agree with Stavros that the average Joe who we want to get
feedback from isn’t going to answer the question.  However, this can also be
done technologically and recorded.  Which page did the user have to go to,
to find the desired link?  How long did they spend looking for their
preferred result?  Which link did they finally choose for which search
terms, and did they have to try multiple searches in the same session to
find what they were looking for?  With this information and basic fuzzy
logic intelligence in the backend, we can certainly improve the relevancy of
results returned.

 

The bottom line is that we are a different search engine, that we are
user-powered and that everyone who uses our search engine is contributing
whether directly or indirectly.  This of course brings up the privacy policy
again and we do need to make it very clear what information we are
collecting from each search and the user should have an option to not send
even anonymous usage information to us.

 

Thoughts, comments, questions, statements and outbursts are of course
welcome.

 

Terry

 

P.S. Hello to everyone.


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