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wikiasari posts

Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Search

Is Wikipedia getting into social networking?

WikiBookWe've been hearing bits and pieces of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' big plans for a search engine for a while now. But it's never been entirely clear how this human-powered search engine would look. Would it be more like Google or Mahalo?

South African blogger Matthew Buckland raises a third option that we hadn't considered. It could look a lot like Facebook.

Last night Wales showed a few screenshots of his new search project to a South African audience. Buckland was in attendance, and he says some of the screenshots looked exactly like Facebook profile pages. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that your search results are going to take you to social networking style pages. Honestly, that doesn't even make much sense. If you're searching for information on Abraham Lincoln, you probably don't expect to find his MySpace page.

So these screenshots could just be showing the user profiles of Wikiasari editors. But considering how many people read and edit Wikipedia every day, we could easily see any sort of social networking component growing pretty big and fast. And without Facebook-style advertising.

Filed under: Internet, News, Web services

Wikiseek launches, not to be confused with Wikiasari

Wikiseek
Remember how we told you a few weeks ago that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Whales was working on a new search engine called Wikiasari? Yeah, that's still not ready yet.

But California-based SearchMe has launched a new search engine based on Wikipedia. It's called Wikiseek, and not only does it search Wikipedia sites, but it also indexes sites that are referenced in Wikipedia articles. When you perform a search, Wikipedia articles will be listed first, followed by results that show up as links in Wikipedia. If it wasn't mentioned on Wikipedia, you won't find it on Wikiseek.

This means there are plenty of sites out there that you're not going to find by using Wikiseek. But odds are if you've got a general query on a movie, pop group, or form of martial arts you'll get relevant search results and not much that you weren't looking for.

The project is sanctioned by Wikipedia, and although there are sponsored links on Wikiseek, the web site says the majority of revenue generated will be donated to the Wikimedia Foundation.

[via TechCrunch]

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Open Source

Wikiasari: Wikipedia founder set to launch a search engine

WikipediaWikipedia 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.

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