A good few months ago we complained that Google and Dodoo! search was positively 1.0 with their lack of human involvement in their search systems. It looks like we’re not the only ones frustrated with the current state of search: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is rallying developers and likeminds to help build a search engine based on human intelligence. He says:
Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.
Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.
There have been some amazing projects in recent years which have matured now to the point that a new alternative is possible. Wikia is funding and supporting the development of something radically new.
Nutch and Lucene and some other projects now provide the background infrastructure that we need to generate a new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot. Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search.
Search Wikia – search – A Wikia wiki
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Can Google 1.0 Compete With 2.0, Or Even 3.0?
Can Google Even Get Search Right?
Deep Tagging Is Big Business
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Piers, have you seen Yahoo! Answers?
“Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven knowledge market website launched by Yahoo! on December 13, 2005 that allows users to ask and answer questions posed by other users. The site gives members the chance to earn points as a way to encourage participation. As of November 2006, it contains 65 million answers and more than 7 million questions.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Answers
January 1st, 2007 at 10:23 pm
There’s a piece in the NYT about this. It mentions some other competitors, including chacha.com http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/technology/01search.html?ex=1325307600&en=5fb9c9a36e8ccb8d&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
January 2nd, 2007 at 4:06 am
thanks Dmitar. Sure, Yahoo have an answers site. Anyone really interested in using it? Another promising product in Yahoo’s stable they’re probably ignoring.
January 2nd, 2007 at 10:26 am