The advent of 2008 brings with it the promise of serious developments in the field of internet search provision. Could this possibly be the year that Google becomes old news?
…Well the answer is; probably not, though a revolution is definitely brewing if you ask Jimmy Wales (creator of Wikipedia), who recently announced the launch of his next big project: Wikia Search - a new search tool offering only 100% relevant, spam free, verified results. Along with Mahalo.com (a similar search tool launched a few months earlier), Wikia Search is basically an attempt to build a perfect search engine, immune to error or mis-interpretation of content. The main point lies in the fact that Wikia Search is not strictly a search ‘engine’ but instead more of a quasi-human search assistant, relying on human, rather than software, interpretation of content to produce its results. Unlike Google, both Mahalo and Wikia Search return exclusively humanly verified, relevant links, compiled by a community of users hand-tailoring results pages for common search terms.
The advantages, and disadvantages, are immediately obvious: these new tools, being human and not computer reliant, are immune to unethical Search Engine Optimization, including various popular Black Hat techniques such as keyword stuffing, the use of link farms, and phishing scams. In essence they will make it impossible for coders to fool the engine’s algorithms and boost rankings for irrelevant links, greatly improving the overall quality of search results, and consequently, web content as a whole. If successful, the potential for cleaning up a lot of the trash in cyberspace is huge; by nullifying its effectiveness and thereby removing any incentive for creating it in the first place. Whereas Google has always kept its algorithms a secret, and been vulnerable to exploitation, Wales hopes Wikia Search will be different, by operating with full open-source transparency, so that any potential issues can be resolved by the entire community of users - rather than a small minority of company-employed programmers.
The obvious drawback lies simply in the size of the job which Mahalo and Wikia Search have taken on. However, in the age of Web 2.0 they are not alone in the task. Rather than try to achieve the impossible feat of single-handedly cataloging the infinite resources of the web, both systems rely upon users to provide feedback and contribute in the creation of tailored results. Mahalo (which means ‘thank-you’ in Hawaiian), for example, encourages users to download the Mahalo ‘Follow’ tool-bar, which enables web-surfers to easily contribute link recommendations to the database, during the course of their normal web activities. Basically the principle is similar to Wikipedia, calling on the whole web-using community to contribute to the building of this huge new content base.
Both projects are still in the early stages, and openly admit that results are not yet great (Wikipedia at one stage, over a year after its inception, had only 14 articles - Wales is clearly not put-off by a slow start), with priority being given to providing results for the web’s most popular searches, and more obscure key-words being matched with Google results. The results that are currently available - mainly for consumer product keywords (these suffer most from ineffective results), are broken down into organized categories, and small summaries - similar to short Wikipedia articles - are offered with the results.
It seems the key issue, and the one that will make or break these ventures, is how successfully they can engage the web-using community to contribute to its content, and how effectively these results can be kept up-to-date with the creation of new relevant content. Unlike Wikipedia, Wikia Search is not a non-profit venture, and it is easy to see why Wales has made this decision. Wikia Search (or Mahalo) looks like the obvious next step in internet search technology; While Google offered the best system for finding content on the web, Wikia Search could go further and actually change the whole nature of available content, essentially performing a colossal clean-up of the last decade’s-worth of spam build-up. Let’s hope they succeed (and that we never have to sift through endless advertisements for Viagra tablets or similar spam in amongst our search results ever again…)
Dejan Levi