Alex Wright

Wikiasari

December 26, 2006

Next year Wikia (Jimbo Wales' for-profit outfit) will release a new Wikified search engine dubbed Wikiasari that purports to take a more human-centered approach to filtering search results by, among other things, giving a higher ranking to sites already dubbed trustworthy by Wikipedia users. As Wales puts it:

Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap ... [W]e need to generate a new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot. Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search. Sounds great in principle, but of course it's all but impossible to judge at this stage. It will be interesting to see how far they push it - I wonder whether this will be mostly about innovating at the algorithm level, or whether they will also try to break Google's hammerlock on search interface design conventions. I also have to wonder whether a name like "Wikiasari" stands any hope of catching on beyond the hardcore tech-heads (why not just "Wikisearch"?). But, in any event, it should be worth a look.

More coverage:

• Niall Kennedy
• TechCrunch
• Times of London

(via Ed)

File under: User Experience

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