Wikipedia Founder to Launch Human-Powered Search Engine

Jimmy Wales, the founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is set to launch his own Internet search engine, Wikia. So what is new, given there are so many of them around, and Google already has a monolithic presence in this field, you may ask. Well, as Wales himself puts it, the biggest difference is his search-engine is human powered!

And that is only for starters. Wales says his search engine will also be open source, which means users will have access to the codes driving the engine so they are able to see exactly ‘how things work’. This is a major difference from other engines present already.

Of all the search engines – MSN Live, Yahoo, Ask.com, and Google, the big daddy of them all – in the multi-billion dollar arena that the online ad market is today, none of them show their algorithms to others for security and business reasons.

Wales’ search engine is an attempt to stir things up and raise the bar a notch. In an interview, he said, “We’re publishing all the algorithms so everyone can see how things work and we're publishing all the data as well so other people can collaborate with us to create other kinds of search indexes.”

It is not like there never has been a human-powered search engine before; there have been a few. However, none of them have the name or backing that Wales’ Wikia has. Not only that, in going open source, Wales has the backing of millions of technologically adept users who share his dream of ensuring the Web changes into a completely democratic application.

Wales’ story will also have a number of listeners interested, as he would be going up against one of the biggest search engine giants on the Web, Google. Analyst Greg Sterling, who works with Sterling Market Intelligence, says a number of people fed up with the complex algorithms of Google could jump on to the Wales bandwagon.

Wales’ search engine allows viewers to give a rating for the results based on relevance. The rating operates on the five-star system. The application would take this feedback from the users to determine search results in the future. The application also intends taking ideas from online social networking sites to determine weightage for user ratings based on existing reputations.

It is not that Wales’ Wikia does not have critics. Critics have their thing to say about it; that its open approach would expose it to spammers. This may well be true, considering Wales himself has said it would take Wikia at least a couple of years to be on par with its competition.

A few other things about Wikia: the service is open to all, though you have to sign up and disclose your identity to be able to rate content. Also, Wikia will initially results taken from its own ranking system and then update these once the user ratings come in. Wikia is being projected as a commercial venture, unlike Wikipedia, which is a non-profit initiative. The money would come from selling advertising on the site.

In another twist to the tale, as Wales gets his Wikia ready to face off against Google’s search engine, Google itself is testing an application that would square off against Wikipedia. Called Knol, the Google product would employ experts to write on a range of subjects.

The basic idea of Knol is apparently to ensure there are no discrepancies or errors in data, something that has been seen in Wikipedia. How much the writers earn would depend on the amount of advertising shown on their pages.

As Udi Manber, a vice president of engineering at Google says in a post on the Google blog, “There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that.”