Jimmy Wales is planning a search engine with Amazon. I’ve written more over at Hyprtext.
Dave
Wikiasari : WikiSearch?
Jimmy Wales, it would appear, is planning a search engine, along with his chums at Amazon, through his for-profit venture, Wikia.
Mr Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was launched in 2003.
The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.
Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next year.
Earlier this year he secured multimillion-dollar funding from amazon.com and a separate cash injection from a group of Silicon Valley financiers to finance projects at Wikia.
Interesting…
Niall Kennedy admits that he’s
skeptical. Sites such as Google, Yahoo!, and Windows Live already have the crowds clicking on search results every day, submitting bookmarks, and, in some cases, flagging spam. Wikia would need a critical mass of users to maintain a useful search index and query analyzer to supply Britney Spears’ fans, medical research, and the many many other search queries submitted every day. The same same search engine pickpockets wandering through Google’s search index will continue to target any significant source of traffic and unlike Wikipedia, you can’t just lock down a contested (or heavily profitable) area and still maintain balance.
Too true.
Ionut over at the Google Operating System blog takes up Wales’ claim that people will be more efficient at deciding whether a page is good or not than a computer:
I think the main job of a search engine is to understand how relevant a page is for a particular query. To scale, a search engine should that algorithmically. While people have a better ability to decide if a page is relevant, that doesn’t mean spammers won’t try to push their sites.
Wales and Wikia are taking on quite a bit at the moment – for example, the OpenServing site isn’t up and running yet (and I’m not yet entirely sure about what it’s meant to do) – and the introduction of a new search engine is a massive task.
And the name is really lame – ‘Google’ has become a verb. Can you imagine anyone ever saying “Can you Wikiasari this for me?” Answer: NO!
Update: In the comments, Jimbo points out that Amazon aren’t involved in the project. More here.
Update 2: Mike Arrington has a screenshot.
[tags]search, wikiasari, wikia, jimmy wales, niall kennedy[/tags]
Gmail from the Stone Ages
Why is it that NONE of the recent new functionality has hit my Gmail account yet? Even Mrs Dave’s account is up-to-date with all the cool stuff Google have been adding of late – and by her own admission, she doesn’t use it, and what’s more doesn’t LIKE IT!
So, if there are any Gmail people out there with nothing better to do over the festive period, please can they look at the poor, unloved excuse for an email account that is briggs.dave@gmail.com and maybe make it just a little bit better?
Please?
[tags]google, gmail[/tags]
What’s the best way to read a feed?
Well, it appears that everyone has much better things to do than blog at the moment, except for me, so news is very thin on the ground. So, I thought I’d empty my mind of all the thoughts I’ve had about reading RSS feeds and dump them into this post. There is, I’m afraid, rambling ahead.
I suppose it all starts from where you should read your feeds. In a standalone application (FeedDemon, er…)? With your web browser (ie using FireFox live bookmarks, or an extension, or IE7’s built in feed aggregation)? In your web browser (Bloglines, Newsgator, Google Reader)? In your email (Thunderbird, Newsgator for Outlook)?
I currently use the first option, the standalone application – to be precise, FeedDemon. One of the first problems with this approach is that you can’t read your feeds on anyone else’s computer. FeedDemon avoids this by allowing you to sync your feeds with NewsGator, a web-based reader (which is, incidently, more or less the only thing that recommends NewsGator…).
Having the standalone app allows you to do more with your feeds – saving posts in news bins, for example, or setting up watchlists so that any posts with certain keywords in them are saved in one place automatically for you. It makes blogging much easier. Actually, there is a problem with the watchlists in FeedDemon – if a post is relevant but doesn’t contain the magic words, you can’t just drop it in.
FeedDemon also helps you to make blog posts – you can click a little icon, which bungs the text and a link that belong to a post into your chosen offline blog editor. This is nice – but not so nice if you don’t have an offline blog editor. Only…I’d like to be able to do my blog posting inside the same application as I do my blog reading. It’d just be neater. I’d also like to be able to build a blog post from more than one original post and from more than one original blog. I’d like to skip around my feeds, selecting bit to quote and adding comments and links here and there as I go. A bit like Google Notebook, really, only eventually being published on a blog.
But I suppose, the more I think about it, if I’m going to combine my blog editing and blog reading software, shouldn’t I just combine my browser too? But the problem is that the browser-based feed readers are a bit on the lame side – FF’s Live Bookmarks are pretty much unusable for anyone who is subscribed to more than two blogs. I haven’t found a plug-in that I’ve liked, either, which is a shame because with Performancing for FireFox, you’ve got the blog editor there too. The built-in RSS support in IE7 isn’t too bad at all, with with the Live toolbar you can automatically blog an entry – if you use Live Writer, that is.
The web-based readers, for me, just don’t offer the functionality that FeedDemon does, especially around the grouping and saving of posts for later blogging. Bloglines and Google Reader let you produce a sort of link-blog thing, saving posts at a viewable URL for later reading. But it’s just not the same.
The closest I can think of to my ideal is Firefox with an RSS reader plug-in which mirrors the functionality of FeedDemon and which can sync with an online feed reader so I can get at my feeds when I’m away from the PC. This needs to be coupled with a blog editor plug-in, like Performancing, which allows me to build a post from multiple blogs, as I mentioned above (does PfF do this already? I don’t actually know) – I don’t want to be copying-and-pasting stuff from all over the place.
Is this too much to ask?
[tags]rss, feed readers, blog editing, blogs, feeddemon, performancing, google reader, bloglines, firefox, ie7[/tags]