The Times of London is reporting that Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is planning to launch a search engine next year in collaboration with Amazon.com. Dubbed Wikiasari, the search engine will allow users to rank web pages in an effort to create more accurate results (via Techmeme):
“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’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.
It appears the big selling point of the search engine will be that it harnesses the wisdom of crowds. Google already does this, with PageRank, but in a less direct way. I am not sure if the new idea is going to fly – how many people really want to rank pages when they search? Usually you just want the results immediately. I’d bet most people won’t want to invest an extra few minutes to visit and rank the results.
I really have no idea what Amazon.com has to do with this project, but recall they too have their own search engine, A9.
Read: Times of London
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