Google has been dominating the search industry for years now and we are only seeing the gap between them and the next best search engine widen. Many new search engines have come and gone trying to challenge Google and the ones that have been around for years seem to just be holding still. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has teamed up with Amazon.com to create a new Internet search engine that they hope will rival Google and Yahoo.
Wikipedia has chosen to use their existing open-access style web site to create this new search engine which is being called Wikia Search. Jimmy Wales and one of his money sources, Amazon.com, is creating Wikia Search, because they believe that with the enormous growth of Google, its search results have become susceptible to manipulation and spam. “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’ and you will not get any useful results” said the 40 year old Wikipedia founder.
The creating of Wikia would be a completely new approach to the way search engines bring back results. Google, Yahoo and all the other major search engines have incorporated a computer algorithm which determines the relevancy of a web site to what the user entered in the search engine. Each search engine has a different algorithm and will show different results. Google is known as having the best and most relevant results for most searches. Wikipedia’s Wikia would avoid the computer algorithm all together and switch to its online encyclopedia style of human edited content. “Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision. This page is good, this page sucks. Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way” said Wales. Jimmy Wales’ theory will replace the computer algorithm with human editors who will decide which pages are the most relevant to a search term.
Wikipedia has become increasingly popular over the years and people seem to like the fact that the content is user generated and can be edited. This new style of search engine has the possibility to do well because of the already popular Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales uses the example of people manipulating Google and Yahoo search engines but with human edited search results, you can still have the same issues. What is to stop a Wikia editor from taking a bribe to rank someone number 1? It doesn’t even have to be that dramatic. The human editors of this search engine may unintentionally have favoritism for one web site or another. There is yet to be a strong contender to Google and only time will tell if Wikipedia’s new search engine can seriously compete with the search giant.
