Wikiasari: The next name in search
The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales is behind the development of a new search engine which utilises the same technology as the open-access encyclopedia.
The search engine is due to go live early next year and at the moment is called “Wikiasari”: wiki is Hawaiian for “quick” and asari is Japanese for “rummaging search”.
Wales hopes that the same type of software and the same network of followers that have made Wikipedia so successful will create a search engine that will overcome the limitations of others such as Google. Google ranks pages according to how many other pages link to it, however according to Wales spammers and commercial ventures are learning how to manipulate Google’s search results.
Wikiasari differs in that the wikiasari community will make the decision as to whether a page is “good” or whether is “sucks donkey balls”, in that way the “good” and therefore the more relevant pages will get a higher ranking and theoretically come up first in the search results.
It will be interesting to see when it goes live but it sure has a lot of ground to cover before it can even begin to threaten the popularity of Google.
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Filed under: computers
Doesn’t roll off the tongue like “I googled that..”
Not to mention, it’s just a matter of time before it suffers the drawbacks of Google and Wikipedia put together. Spammers and commercial ventures figure out a way to artificially elevate their ranks (sock monkey accounts?) and administrators become drunk with their own power and cripple the effectiveness of the very tool they profess to be defending.