Wikipedia founder to start search engine
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the world’s biggest community-written online encyclopedia, announced Friday that he had taken a small step toward his next big goal: a community-programmed search engine that competes with Google. Wales told a group of computer scientists and programmers gathered at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland that Wikia, the for-profit Internet publishing company he founded after Wikipedia, had just acquired search technology that will serve as the foundation for the new search engine.
The technology, known as Grub, creates an index of the World Wide Web by borrowing the processing power donated by volunteer computers, similar to the SETI@home project that looks for extraterrestrial life. Grub was previously owned by LookSmart, an early Internet directory that has more recently operated as an online advertising company. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Once the Wikia index is built, people looking for information on the Web will be able to submit queries and receive answers from a combination of computer algorithms and community feedback. Wales’ goal is to make Internet search more accurate by revealing the technology behind it. He said he would release Grub’s computer code under an open-source license that allows others to make improvements. Should Google start worrying about its no 1 position? Not yet, but who knows what’s gonna happen tomorrow…
Comments(13)
wikitube, wikilog, wikip2p… do it all… wiki rocks!
sounds like a great idea. But i think it will be hard to compete with google!
They’ll need a really unique system to make that happen
Sounds very interesting! I do quite a bit of SEO myself, so I understand much of how search engines work…and currently, the biggest drawback of search engines would be the separation of relavant vs non-relevant search results (mostly due to manipulative SEOs). Google comes closest in terms of advanced algorithms, and it is said that much of their data is acquired from user input. If im understanding this Wiki concept correctly, it will provide the Grub system with even more user data, and in turn, provide more accurate SERPs. Definitely sounds like spyware to me though…haha.
Yeah, right, I’m really going to give up some of my proc cycles for a bloody search engine… a cure for cancer maybe… but a search engine no way, Jose.
wikipedia is a very good website
They could at least chose a name, that is not already taken by another often searched-for pc project. The grub bootloader for linux.
It’s good to a degree, bringing democracy to information isn’t the best approach as various cases of people tailoring entries to fit their own means can be found.
It’s a great site in theory and for the most part action, I’m interested in what they have to offer in the search engine field, things could get interesting
Then again do i need a search engine that is probably gonna hammer me with results from wikkipedia?
$100 says that the first search result on every search is a wikipedia page. I don’t know about the founders but wikipedia is becoming ridiculous.
Take for example the page that’s dedicated in finding errors from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some of the corrections are f*cked up: “Britannica is wrong because the information in wikipedia says different. I’d just want to do a Dick Cheney and shoot those ppl in the face with a spas…
Why would someone donate CPU time to a for-profit search engine ?
google used to hold a premiere position amongst IT companies with all their altruistic goals and all, i’m not sure i still trust them the way i used to. there is an opprtunity to knock em off i believe, and open source would be the ideal trump card to the google ‘do no evil’ mantra
WP pwns, i contribute my tv screenshots now
Why would someone donate CPU time to a for-profit search engine ? ………. Wikimedia Foundation for-profit … since when ??????
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a US-registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity.
Good idea. Ridicilusly bad coosen name. =) Damn, they really shouldnt name it the same as something that is so known as the grub bootloader. Really, they shouldnt.