[Search-l] Short interview with Jeremie Miller

[Jason Calacanis]

Some interesting feedback from Seth below... interested to hear the answers
to these questions.

best j
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Jason McCabe Calacanis
CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com


"Wikia Search" interview and state of Wikipedia-model search project

There's a brief interview with Jeremie Millier about the current status of
what he's doing for "Wikia search", which is the for-profit Wikipedia-model
search project.

I'd submitted a few suggested questions for this interview, but they were
all rejected. I had wanted to know:

    1) Roughly, how many people will be *paid* on the project?

    1b) Can you specify whether at developed vs. developing economy pay
scales?

    2) Do you plan to hire anyone with search engine development expertise?

    3) Do you think there's a cultural conflict between Wikipedia's model of
operating, where in theory nobody owns any articles, and code development,
where typically specific people "own" various subsystems? Which path do you
plan to try to follow?

Note understanding 1b) requires some context. It was based on how the
company Wikia had decided to offshore programmers - to Poland! That's
definitely not something that's talked about a lot.

    "Wales said he settled on Poland in part because software engineers
there are simultaneously highly skilled and affordable, a combination that
he said is hard to find, even elsewhere in Eastern Europe."

[Keep in mind, all you US programmers who are tempted to fall for the
marketing, you're not affordable - everyone thinks it's going to be the
other guy who works for free.]

Anyway, even though the interview only covers technical topics, it's still
worth a read if you're interested in some details of what's behind the hype
the audience is being fed.

For summary, given my position above, I'll just quote John McCormac's
list-comment

    Interesting interview. I didn't realise that Grub was quite that bad.

    ...

    On the search side, the Wikiasearch project (if we can call it that)
doesn't seem to be doing anything beyond what hundreds of small search
startups are doing. The management, bundling and repackaging aspects is, so
far, perhaps the only innovative angles.
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