Wikipedia founder plans search engine to rival nothing

Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, has been going on and on about plans for his new search engine, Wikia Search, for nearly a year; we were pretty excited when we first heard the news about the formerly named Wikiasari search engine. But Wikiasari is long out the window, and has been under development for so long that Mr. Wales seems to have forgot what the search engine was supposed to be all about – the people.

Just as Wikipedia is by the people, for the people, Wikia Search was also supposed to be user driven. The people who use the system were supposed to determine which pages were good, and which were not. Wales prided himself, at the time, on the fact that his search engine would not be driven by a heartless computer. It was a brilliant idea, it was simple, and it was supposed to follow in the true wiki way.

But Wikia Search has changed, and is no longer considered to be “the people’s search engine.” Mr. Wales has announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, a search engine project from LookSmart, and released it under an open source license.

“We’ll give away all the technology, all the data. Release everything under a free license because in my view the idea has been very solidly proven wrong by Wikipedia that in order to out-compete on the Internet you need to have a walled garden of special content no one else has.” said Mr. Wales.

Grub is to be integrated into the Wikia Search, allowing developers to quickly and easily extend and add functionality to improve the quality and performance of the entire system. But relying on the people to aid in the development of Wikia Search doesn’t come without its disadvantages.

“The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses. Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box,” said Mr. Wales.

Lets imagine for a minute that Wikia Search does become successful. Tens of thousands of users would go to Wikia Search daily to fulfill their search needs. But what will soon follow is those who try to beat the system.

Take Google for example; hundreds of people’s sole jobs are to aid in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and try to decode the Google algorithm. It is this algorithm that we believe Jimmy refers to as “invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.” Some may have a good idea of how Google chooses which sites to display first on search results, but no one knows for sure.

This secretive “black box” is what keeps Google working. Companies will certainly hire programmers to analyze the Wikia Search code to determine how they can beat the system, how they can have their website appear on the top of the list for many, many search queries.

And these companies won’t have useful information. They’ll most likely be those aggravating male enhancement websites or something to that affect. The bottom line is that after Wikia Search’s algorithm is known, it will not only be just another search engine, but will reasonably be the worst search engine on the Internet.

Wales said, earlier this year, when Wikia Search goes live in late 2007, it will contain a really big warning: “It sucks, we know it sucks.”  He also acknowledged the failure of the project by saying, “If published algorithms make it too easy for spammers to game the system then we’ve got a real problem and my whole idea won’t work.”

Kudos to Jimmy for trying to reinvent the search engine, but take it from Google, the most successful search engine on the Internet, don’t publish your algorithm.

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