Wikia to build search engine

Wikia, the commercial version of non-profit online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is planning to build a search engine which could capture up to 5% of the Internet search market. The search engine would aim to compete with market leaders Google and Yahoo.

The news was revealed by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, at a news conference in Tokyo.

Wales believes that collaborative search technology could fundamentally change the power structure of the Internet, with users working together to enhance search engines in the same way that Wikipedia articles are re-written and developed by users.

A major advantage is that a collaborative search engine could be less susceptible to spam because of the constant updates.

However, a major disadvantage is that online collaborative projects have a history of being dominated by a minority of people, who have neither the qualifications nor the skills to justify their decision making. The result can range between clique behaviour or rampant mob rule.

This has been exemplified by complaints about DMOZ, the open directory project owned by AOL but begun in the late 1990’s, which has been roundly criticised for poor transparency and clique behaviour.

More recently it has been shown to be a major failing with Digg, a news site run by young teenagers, who have shown themselves averse to self-criticism and have banned a whole string of sites for little reason other than they are connected with the search marketing industry.

Wikipedia itself has not been free of criticisms along both lines, with some editors possessively taking control of subject areas away from other users, while others yet have masqueraded as leading experts only to be found to be entirely unqualified.

While Jimmy Wales may well hope that a collaborative search engine may provide certain advantages over existing search engines, it’s difficult to see how yet another search engine in a crowd of start-up search engine wannabes, is actually going to break new ground in this area – either in terms of improved relevancy, or significant market share.