Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is serious about taking on Google and Yahoo in the Search Engine market.
Earlier this year in Tokyo, Wales shed a little more light on his goal. He plans on creating an open-source, human-powered Search Engine. This stands in contrast to the standard “robot” powered Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Friday, Wales announced that Wikia had taken the next step with the acquisition of Grub for use as their web crawler.
He feels that he can take about 5 percent of the Internet search market with Wikia (formerly, some called Wikiasari) and is planning on a public version of the site toward the end of this year.
Volunteer human-editors would help sort out search terms which have more than one possible meaning. One example given was the term “Palm”. If one searches for that, are they looking for information on the handheld computer, the tropical tree or the inside part of the hand?
I think that Wales has a good idea in that he wants to make it more difficult to spam the Search Engines in order to rank higher AND he wants to empower the actual content publishers as opposed to the search companies, as it stands currently.
The way it is now, if one knows how to manipulate the Search Engine to their advantage, they can get their content to rank higher than others, even if the other content is of better quality or more relevant. A human-edited search engine would eliminate that ability, in theory.
