[Search-l] Crazy idea for how this could work

[Mark Schellhase]

I have not really been following the development of the search engine until
recently. That said, I have an idea.
After using the Wikia Search alpha I have concluded that there really must
be some sort of automatic not fully handcrafted result. When people come to
a search engine they want relevant links, not a small little article.
Although these articles can be very helpful if you don't know what something
is, or just want a few basic facts, when you want more in depth info as is
often the case, you want more then a basic facts article. For instance, say
I search for "Hillary Clinton". I probably know that she is a candidate in
the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, and might even know where she stands
on the issues. It is quite likely that what I really want are links to her
campaign site, news stories about her, sites for and against her, etc.

So basically you have to have a list of links for each search, like
traditional search engine results have. Where the social part of Search
Wikia would come in is showing the mini article if there is one, in an upper
frame or something, then below have the more traditional results found by a
crawler. But these crawler results would be editable by humans, so
non-relevant sites could me manually removed, and missed relevant sites
could be added. It might even be possible to have the crawler possess some
sort of artificial intelligence system so it could learn from the mistakes
it made that were corrected by humans.

Okay, this may have been totally unclear, against the core principles of the
project, already thought of, etc. But it's just an idea.

I would love to hear some feedback on this.
--Mark Schellhase
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