The founder of Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) announced last Friday that he is creating a community developed web search service that would be a rival for other search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Wikipedia already acquired a pioneering web crawler named Grub (from LookSmart) to index relevant sites. Grub was originally an open source project that was freely available to software developers as long as they shared any improvements they made.
The new Wikipedia search service is planned to launch at the end of 2007 and will combine computer driven algorithms and human assisted editing. The human editors are for help with terms with multiple meanings, such as palm (palm beach or handheld computers). The search results are generated via another open source software project called Lucerne, but the details about this open source project are not revealed yet.
I think Wikipedia makes a good chance to rival Google and Yahoo. They are well known and getting respect from the people on the web. I am looking forward to see the launch of this new search service at the end of 2007!
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September 3rd, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Thanks for sharing it and I am also eager to see it
September 3rd, 2007 at 8:12 pm
I am also eager.
I think there needs to be more competition in the Search Engine field again, such as the early days of Yahoo well before Google.
September 4th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
this should be interesting however no one has been really able to rival google in a lot of things
September 4th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Wikipedia will definitely give other search engines a run for their money. Isn’t Wikipedia one of the top searched terms in the Google search engine?
-Gregg
September 4th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I don’t know about that Gregg, but what I do know is that Baidu is kicking Google his ass in China and wikipedia will also attack on google his share.. Can’t wait to see what happens!!
September 5th, 2007 at 12:21 am
I don’t think it will happen. If the site ever becomes a threat to google, and google decided to pull the infamous blacklist on *wiki* from their results, wikipedia would lose 90% of its traffic, and ultimately kill the search engine.
Just my opinion.
September 5th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
[...] Nomar — monarch of which country we cannot say — is reporting that Wikipedia plans to rival Google with a search engine of their own. Instead of completely relying on some secret algorithm like the [...]
September 7th, 2007 at 6:22 am
I don’t think any search engine with too much of a human element will ever dominate. Super relevancy algorithms will always be key.
Too much room for corruption, leading to search results that are not credible/unbiased.
September 7th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
I thought the search project was seperate from wikipedia, but was just run by the founder of wikipedia.
September 8th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Good luck to them! I can’t see anyone rivaling Google at the moment. There can be alternatives for other types of search but Google will still dominate.
September 10th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
human algoritham is the next web 2.0 thing. how can people be so sure about having a auto algo. which will give you the best. I think everyone shud be transparent. I will certainly welcome a rival to google since they know too much about me and you.