Jimmy Wales, the person that brought you Wikipedia, is talking about building a new internet search engine. The idea is to create a search engine "whose output is continually refined by user participation, just as Wikipedia theoretically gets better as users spot and correct errors".
If you haven't looked at Wikipedia, it's an internet based dynamic encyclopedia that allows users world wide to add and refine content in real time and theoretically gets better continuously. You can find most any topic in Wikipedia and generally the information is on target and kept up to date by the user base. It is self policed by the users and content that is unclear or erroneous gets corrected by the user base.
Read the article on the proposed new search engine...
News and Observer
March 21, 2007
Paul Gilster
Making searches more precise
Jimmy Wales, the man responsible for the Wikipedia collaborative encyclopedia, is talking about building a better search engine.Wales' company, Wikia (www.wikia.com), uses many of Wikipedia's user-involved techniques to host publishing sites on a wide range of topics. What he seems to have in mind is a search engine whose output is continually refined by user participation, just as Wikipedia theoretically gets better as users spot and correct errors.
Just how this will play out is unclear, because Wikipedia remains controversial. Unlike the Encyclopedia Britannica, which draws on the work of experts, Wikipedia is open to contributions from anyone on the Net. Read more...
