Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, intends to start his own search engine. The project would be called Wikiasari (from wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”). He indicated it would use the same user-based technology, which sounds like the idea would be to have users contribute to the search engine, much as they do with articles on Wikipedia.
“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,” he said.
Mr Wales believes that Google’s computer-based algorithmic search program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans. Source: Times Online
He’s right about some of the results, but really, for the most part, I am satisfied with Google results. On the other hand, this could be a good idea, but as we know with such famous incidents as Stephen Colbert asking his viewers to edit the article on elephants to state that the population of African elephants had tripled in the last decade, since “wikiality” would make it so, user-contributed information can be easily corrupted. In fact, Wales himself has said Wikipedia should not be used for academic research (for obvious reasons). Will Jimmy tell us not to trust his search engine results “if you really need to find something”, too?
