[Search-l] Short interview with Jeremie Miller

[Jimmy Wales]

Though I agree with Jeremie that the questions are a bit silly, I think 
they are easy enough to answer:

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

Like any organization, this will depend on the level of success at each 
stage of the project.  As we ramp up, we will hire more and more people.

Google has more than 10,000 employees.  An open source search engine 
will create it's own ecosystem of competition so even if we are 
successful, we would not expect to achieve Google level of market share, 
and so I doubt if we would end up with that many employees.

And if we are unsuccessful, then we will eventually end up with zero 
employees.  I will have to get a job flipping burgers.  Jeremie will 
pursue his basketball career.  Gil, of course, will be doing his stand 
up comedy routine. :)

What I am saying: I really don't understand what the question means, 
other than that.  Our number of employees will be dependent on the 
course of the project and on the success.  Just like every other 
organization on the planet.

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

We attempt to follow ethical hiring practices around the world.  Like 
Google, Yahoo, and I suppose every company, we try to pay to get the 
best people... for us, this means trying to pay on the high end of the 
scale necessary to attract the best talent...

One thing we have a moral commitment to doing is offering stock options 
even in countries and cultures where this is not the norm.

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

Yes, of course.  What a strange question.

 >    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?

I do not anticipate that we would attempt a "wikipedia model" for code 
development.  Traditional open source development models are well-tested 
and proven.

One objective for the search project is to find ways to push editorial 
judgments (and even in the selection of algorithms and parameters for 
algorithms there is editorial judgments) into the public for 
transparency and community control.  Just exactly how to do that is one 
of the interesting questions we will need to solve.

--Jimbo