Wiki Expanding Into Search
Tom_P
Jimmy Wales, co founder of Wikipedia was not taken seriously in 2001 when he announced he was going to create a free encyclopaedia made up of public submissions. These people however were made to eat their words as Wikipedia has gone from strength to strength, now containing 2million articles in English alone it provides a digital resource for many internet users.
Mr. Wales has recently announced that the company are to expand into the search engine market with ‘Wikia’. The new site which is being made public on January 14th is hoped to have as much success as its encyclopaedic brother.
Wales has been quick to state however that people should not expect to find a “Google killer” when they visit the site. As the engine will rely upon user’s reviews of searches along the lines of relevance and usefulness, the site’s early stages will not produce searches of the greatest quality.
The user reviews will be incorporated into the site in time, creating a search engine that produces evermore useful answers. The sites reliance upon the ‘wisdom of crowds’ however has worried some commentators who suggest the site will be susceptible to the work of people trying to advance their own site rankings.
Wiki have countered by stating such people will be expelled from using the site. Mr. Wales has also gone onto attack the big three of the search engine market; Google, Yahoo and Microsoft stating that it is worrying that there are so few gatekeepers of global information. Especially considering most people do not understand these sites’ selection process.
Mr Wales has been recorded as saying on the issue “I think it is unhealthy for the citizens of the world that so much of our information is controlled by such a small number of players, behind closed doors.” Whether this can be seen as a crusade for freer information or a business angle Mr. Wales is pursuing is a matter for debate.
Out of all the companies who have attempted to challenge the big three’s hold on the internet ‘Ask’ have been the most successful; they are currently fourth in the list of search engines. An ‘Ask’ spokesman commented that time would be the telling factor on the Wikia website although he did raise concerns over the manipulation of the search engine’s system.
Mr Wales however will scoff at these arguments from competitors; after all he was criticised at the launch of Wikipedia. The encyclopaedia website however offered a different quality to this search engine variant, it allowed contributors to write and submit information. The simple rating of searches will not be as appealing to the mass public and Mr Wales will be hard pushed to combat the imposing dominance that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft possess in the search engine market.
Posted on: Tuesday, January 8, 2008 at 10:34 am 
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