Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales to Develop Search Engine, Wikiasari

| Amit Chowdhry | Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 | 128 Views

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[Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, image source Wikipedia]
[Edit: Please note that my source has a bit of incorrect information. Judging by the comment by Mr. Wales in this blog post, it appears that Amazon is not a part of this project.]

Wikiasari, a combination of the Hawaii words, ‘wiki’ and ‘asari’ which mean ‘quick ‘and ‘rummaging search’ respectively is the name of a new upcoming search engine that will be developed by Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia. The new search engine team is aiming to become a rival against Google and Yahoo!.

The new search initiative is inspired partially by the flaws found in Google search by Wales. “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’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” stated Wales. Wales had also mentioned that Google is notorious for being a victim of spammers who know how to manipulate the system and have their sites placed high in the page results.

“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’,” added Mr Wales. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.”

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” added Wales. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

According to StartupSquad, Wales is planning to utilize similar technology as Wikipedia that involves open source information input by users. The search engine is expected to be released early 2007.
[source: Times Online UK]

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