Wikipedia, Amazon VS. Google

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is gearing up to take on Google and has marked the calendar for the release of Wikiasari early next year.

His basic argument is that Google’s computer algorithms are being manipulated by spammers and others. This leads to less than desirable search results in some cases. He comments that a search for “Tampa hotels” returns no useful results (I tend to disagree because there are several hotel websites shown on the first page, along with Tripadvisor and things like that, but who am I?).

At any rate, Wales feels that a human will do the best job at determining the relevancy of a web site (now that I agree with). He says:

We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.

If it only takes a second, why does it take DMOZ soooooo long? ;). I would imagine that with the recent publicity related to possible DMOZ problems, Wales has taken that into consideration. Human edited anything is going to be better than computer edited, IMO, as long as 1) you can trust the human editors to do a good job and not show favoritism and 2) the human editors can get the job done in a reasonable amount of time.

If it takes me 3 months or longer to show up in Wikiasari, that is no good. If a Wikipedian accepts a “bribe” to speedup the review process or to place my site above another, that is no good. But if little ole me has thought of those potential issues, I am sure that Jimmy Wales has thought of them also, and developed a plan of attack.

Anyway, naturally the buzz around “the next big thing” will do allot for this project. He already has the success of Wikipedia in his corner so people know he can be very successful.