Monday, 3 September 2007

WikiSearch Will Challenge Google: Wales

Jimmy Wales, the founder of free online encyclopaedia says the human powered search engine that he is launching by end of this year will be better than Google in every sense....

Jimmy Wales, the founder of free online encyclopaedia says the human powered search engine that he is launching by end of this year will be better than Google in every sense.

Wales said the search engine would usurp all existing search engines in three years. Unlike Google and Yahoo search engines where the algorithms search for relevant result, Wikisearch will have humans as postmasters who deliver the right results. .

Wales claimed humans were better than machines in judging the results. “If you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘This page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgment; so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method of doing it ourselves. 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.”

Wikipedia is one of the world’s top viewed sites and has over 8.2 million articles. As it is free and open to anyone for editing, it has a cult following. However users and fans of the site have stubbornly rejected any attempts to have advertising on the site. Now, Wikisearch will be ad supported much on similar lines of Google, Yahoo and Ask.com.

Pierre Omidyar, the founder of online auction site ebay and now one of the US’ richest man, has backed Wales in his new effort. Wales also has backing of several others.