[Search-l] Old markets and methods vs. new

[Rainer Blome]

Aerik Sylvan wrote:
> [...] Mahalo [...] a search application.

Hm, search application?  Not really.  Search for something that has no 
article (a dedicated page) on Maholo, and yes, you get search results 
(actually provided by competing search engine(s)).  But search for 
something that *has* a page, and too often you get no useful 
information.  The problem is that when they do have a page, they only 
show what's on that dedicated page, and no more.  It's like Wikia Search 
would only show the mini article, once there is one.  Effectively, the 
"search" part is dropped in those cases.  By design, these cases are 
common, because Maholo aims to cover the common searches.  What's more, 
the pages are so cluttered that it is hard to see the external links.

> [...] the data being built in Wikipedia (and similar 
> projects) is huge and is under-utilized.  [...] My favorite possibility 
> is category intersections.  A category in Wikipedia is essentially a tag 
> - someone has said that this chunk of information should be associated 
> with this concept.

Wikipedia embodies a semantic network. The links are sometimes not 
unambiguous, but I guess that effective automated use is possible 
(exploiting the "human computation" done there). Some are already trying 
it, just search for "semantic mining wikipedia" or "wikipedia link 
structure".  The categories make the semantic network relatively 
explicit and therefore easier to mine, but mining should be possible 
even without them.  And yes, it would be swell to have a search engine 
which guesses Wikipedia articles and categories and directly links to them.

Rainer