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Trend: User generated search engine
Written By Josefine Koehn on Friday, February 9, 2007 at 12:19 AM | In Technology, USA Please Comment
Socially driven search engines are poised to become the Web 2.0 alternative to Google and Yahoo.
Trend Description:
In December 2006, Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales announced the development of a user-generated search engine. The goal is to build an open-source based alternative for web search, offering people-powered search results. Several competing developments are taking coming out of beta. There are two parts that are going to be “crowdsourced”, the wiki and the software.
Cases:
Search Wikia
Search Wikia is supposed to become a wiki-inspired search engine. Since December 2006 the site “Search Wikia†serves as a platform for the development of this new, free, open-source search engine with user-editable results. Search Wikia itself is neither a search engine nor a web directory. To help the search engine get up and running, users can join the mailing list, discuss ideas on the forum or by write basic articles. Right now Search Wikia is looking for content about other search engines. Software developers can also get involved.Wikia
Wikia, formerly called Wikicities, is a collection of communities with websites that users can edit themselves. The hosting of a wiki-based (by Wikia Inc.) content site is free for communities, who on the other site will create free content with the MediaWiki software. Wikia will provide technical and social support for all aspects of running a wiki community. Most topics related to community projects are accepted. Exceptions are ideas that compete with the Wikimedia projects, which the Wikia founders are heavily involved in. According to the Wikia website, Wikia is not a Wikimedia project, like some press coverage suggested. Although Wikia has some crossover with Wikipedia (founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales). Some communities of Wikia are linked to relevant Wikipedia articles.
Wikisearch/Wikiseek
Wikisearch is a search engine that searches Wikipedia and all sites that are linked to from Wikipedia. It is not a search engine of the World Wide Web, and is not related to this site “Search Wikia” and to the plans for community-created search of the World Wide Web. Under the pilot name Wikiseek, Wikia is currently looking for beta testers for this new service.Wikisaria
There is also a commercial search engine, called Wikisaria. Users can search for music downloads, cheap flights, domain names, digital cameras and anything else. The results are mostly links to other websites collecting links.
Trend Impact:
Social Media and User Generated Content are the two big trends on the Web right now. Web 2.0 is thriving from the participation of the users, and so far the users seem to be more than willing to participate by creating free content in every imaginable format, or contribute by writing open source software. The success of a user generated search engine, like the project wikisearch, will depend on the the active contribution of the public. Search Wikia founder Jimmy Wales blames other search engines for producing too much spam and hopes to provide better results by letting people themselves judge if a site is good or not. The question is how long it will take to have enough entries to really be comparible to the already established search engines. In the long run it’s all about quality not quantity.
Links:
Wikia
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