Filed under: Internet, Web services, Open Source
Wikiasari: Wikipedia founder set to launch a search engine
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is preparing to launch a search engine. The Times of London reports that the new search engine will be called Wikiasari, combining the Hawaiian word "wiki" which means quick with the Japanese "asari," which means rummaging search.Wales is basing Wikiasari (which Techcrunch reports had initially been billed as Wikisearch) as an improvement upon the traditional search engine method. Sites like Google rely on computer-based algorithms to determine which search results are most relevant to your query. Wikipedia is based on a million trained monkeys (that'd be you) constantly updating an online encyclopedia. Why not apply that method to search results?
The search engine will be open source, and the index will be available under a GFDL.
According to the main page of the project, Wikiasari is being reworked and could be set to launch on December 27th. Given that Wales has now shot down several bits of info that had been circulating, (Amazon is not involved in the project, as the Times had reported, and Wikiasari is not tied in any way to Wikipedia, as Techcrunch had reported) I'm reluctant to guess much more than that at the moment.
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Charles said 9:25PM on 12-24-2006
It's about time. I've been using Google for the longest, perhaps too long.
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Jon said 8:53AM on 12-25-2006
I always use Google, whether it will be interesting to look it will strongly differ from Google?
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Muzzia said 8:54AM on 12-25-2006
Hmmm will this make my Wikipedia stocks on trendio go up? http://www.trendio.com/word.php?wordid=2315&language=en
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Sergio Gandrus said 8:40AM on 12-26-2006
Search engine market needs new competitor.
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Victor Agreda, Jr. said 8:48AM on 12-28-2006
Now I wonder if he'll sell ads somehow, you know, just to keep the project going, innovating... nah, he'll just ask for donations. Wouldn't want ads messing up results like, you know, on Google ;)
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Mark Casey said 7:18PM on 12-29-2006
Wikiasari is going to bomb. Here are two posts explaining why:
http://keysmun.blogspot.com/2006/12/why-developers-wont-work-on-wikiasari.html
http://keysmun.blogspot.com/2006/12/why-wikiasari-will-fail.html
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mrCMR said 7:21PM on 1-27-2007
Maybe you didn't read it but this new searh-engine isn't going to be named wikiasari!
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