Wikipedia Founder Taking On Google?

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Wikipedia’s founder thinks he can take on Google with his latest project, Wikia Search. Raise your hand if you think he can succeed where MS and Yahoo have failed so far. No, seriously…raise your hand. Anyone?

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales hopes that Wikia Search, a project he spearheads, will break Google's domination as the world's most widely used Internet search engine.
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I will say that my initial reaction was "no chance"; google has worked great for me really since it was first released and it's hard to imagine any meaningful improvements.

However, he brings up a good point with site rankings and if they find a way to incorporate the communal-contribution aspect of wikipedia towards search results, it could possibly work... would be a good way to filter out malicious and irrelevant websites.

Still unlikely but I think he certainly at least has a better chance than MS or Yahoo since neither really brings anything different to the table.
 
Ok, let's take a survey!

If you use Wikipeida's search to search Wikipedia, raise your hand! :rolleyes:

....

Anyone?

Ok....

0% for Wiki's search, 100% for Google's search. :D
 
He has a very good idea. Better then anything MS or Yahoo! came up with. But I don't see it happening. If I need to look something up on wiki it's a quick google search with wiki at the end of the string...

-V
 
It's going to be rather difficult to take on Google when Wikipedia's search function is basically useless.

Google has basically perfected internet searching. Find somewhere else to innovate.
 
The chairman of Google (Eric Schmidt) was on Mad Money yesterday and they brought up Wiki. He indicated Google would prefer to partner up with them.
 
riot8ap said:
The chairman of Google (Eric Schmidt) was on Mad Money yesterday and they brought up Wiki. He indicated Google would prefer to partner up with them.
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:sniff: :sniff: :sniff: whats that I smell? Is it... the smell of Google planning on a hostile takeover of Wiki?:p

But seriously there were search engines before Google and there will be search engines after them. To think that Google will somehow reign supreme forever is narrow sighted.
 
Go Wiki Foundation! Wikipedia is great and if they make a search engine, imagine what it would do.... Sorry google, all you can do now is pout:p
 
He will develop something....google feels a little threatened and drop a ton of cash in his lap, and then he calls it a day
 
rhouck said:
I will say that my initial reaction was "no chance"; google has worked great for me really since it was first released and it's hard to imagine any meaningful improvements.

However, he brings up a good point with site rankings and if they find a way to incorporate the communal-contribution aspect of wikipedia towards search results, it could possibly work... would be a good way to filter out malicious and irrelevant websites.

Still unlikely but I think he certainly at least has a better chance than MS or Yahoo since neither really brings anything different to the table.
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That would work great until a forum decided to make a search query like, "Mothers Day" link the top results to either ♥♥♥♥♥♥ or Rick Roll videos.
 
Raises hand.

For quite a long while now, whenever seeking first blush info re anything, I open google & enter whateveritis wiki, which already often contains many other useful links at the bottom of the article, so yeah, I can see this working out.

Until then, google remains the default starting plcae for web searches, but that could change in a nanosecond.
 
/raise hand

Sure he has a shot.. When Google was small, no one thought they could take on AltaVista or Yahoo, now look at them.. I think any guy in an internet connection and an idea can beat Google. The problem is the idea.
 
The real problem is, as pointed out before, that anyone that wants anything on Wikipedia jsut types wiki + whatever in google and gets results. If you typed the same thing in Wikipedia's serach you probably wouldn't get jack shit.
 
At least Wikipedia uses case-sensitive article namiong. The lack of support for case sensitivity, regular expressions or proper boolean handling makes Google (and all other search engine I know of) full of fail. I want to be able to search for an exact string, or combination of strings, with case and punctuation as entered, without including close matches such as plurals. Seriously, why is it so difficult to actually search for what the user enters?
 
Nemesis999 said:
The real problem is, as pointed out before, that anyone that wants anything on Wikipedia jsut types wiki + whatever in google and gets results. If you typed the same thing in Wikipedia's serach you probably wouldn't get jack shit.
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I do all my searches in Wiki :p And I've actually never had a problem finding anything and often PREFER it do to the way it gives descriptions.

Regardless, your point is irrelevant. The types of changes he is talking about introducing are different than what is already in the Wiki search.
 
JDAdams said:
At least Wikipedia uses case-sensitive article namiong. The lack of support for case sensitivity, regular expressions or proper boolean handling makes Google (and all other search engine I know of) full of fail. I want to be able to search for an exact string, or combination of strings, with case and punctuation as entered, without including close matches such as plurals. Seriously, why is it so difficult to actually search for what the user enters?
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http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=searchguides.html&ctx=advanced
 
JDAdams said:
At least Wikipedia uses case-sensitive article namiong. The lack of support for case sensitivity, regular expressions or proper boolean handling makes Google (and all other search engine I know of) full of fail. I want to be able to search for an exact string, or combination of strings, with case and punctuation as entered, without including close matches such as plurals. Seriously, why is it so difficult to actually search for what the user enters?
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Ya... might wanna read the above post. Google has tons of features for anyone that puts the effort into reading.
 
Nemesis999 said:
Ya... might wanna read the above post. Google has tons of features for anyone that puts the effort into reading.
Click to expand...

I'm aware of all of those functions, but they are for the most part unhelpful. For instance...

Case-sensitivity: It should be self-evident that there is no facility at all to perform a case sensitive search. Any term entered will match similar terms regardless of case, even if placed within quotes.

Punctuation: It's not possible to search for terms with punctation, for instance when searching for the Japanese game developer "h.a.n.d." - a search returns all results for "hand" so is completely useless. Similarly if I want to seach for ""james.adams" I get all results for "James Adams" , again not what I want. Similarly for currency - dollars appear to work but searching for "£1000" for instance matches all instances of "1000" . Or commas - ""20,000 leagues" matches "20000 leagues" . Or "Panic!" - matches ""panic".

Regular expression: "alien vs predator" returns 6610000 results, "aliens vs predator" 5300000, and "alien* vs predator" should return both sets but only returns 194000. Numrange gives very limited functionality but not enough to allow a proper regular expressions search. For instance if I want to search for both grey or gray (US/UK spellings) I can't. "gr?y" is close but also matches "gr@y" "gr y" and all sorts of other combinations. I should be able to specify something like gr[a,e]y or gr(a OR e)y but these do not work. Successive numranges also fail to work - if I want to search for a string of 11 digits e.g. [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] there is no way to do so - "0..9+0..9+0..9+0..9+0..9+0..9+0..9+0..9+0..9+0..9+0..9" is the closest construct possible and this does not work.

Plurality: Unlike most of the other problems, this one can be worked around. Fishes entered without quotes also matches fish, but "fishes" does not. Still, since quotes are only supposed to be used for phrase matching, I object to having to quote a single word to tell Google not to fetch a compeltely different word.

Boolean: Works in many cases, specifically simple AND, OR and NOT. XOR is unavailable, but apart from that most things do seem to work, for instance if I want to fetch any combination of two sets of two terms but not a fifth term - as in "A OR B AND C or D" -E this does appear to work.
 
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