Jimmy Wales Takes On Google!
Posted on: July 29th, 2007 by BompaJimmy Wales Takes On Google!
Never heard of Jimmy Wales? He’s the founder of the phenomenally sucessful, anyone-can-edit, free encyclopedia Wikipedia.com. Even though wikipedia.com uses the anyone-can-edit philosophy, it’s just about as authoritative as one can find online considering that it touches on hundreds of thousands of topics.
Friday Jimmy announced that he is putting together a community-based search engine that will rival Google. (This is not the same as wikiseeki.com which is restricted to wikipedia pages).
Whoa! Is this guy the Superman of the search engines? The Robin Hood of the web? Fighting for the people’s free content?
Well, Jimmy’s new venture will be a for-profit outfit called Wikia.com and if he can pull this off, he’ll be the Superman of Wall Street. He’s already bought grub, a pioneering SETI-like, distributed-web-crawler from Looksmart, and is planning to have the search results ranking generated by another open-source software project called Lucerne.
What will be different?
For one thing, instead of doing the web-crawling and indexing on Wikia’s servers, Wales wants end users to do the crawling for him. If successful, that could literally mean millions of home/business computers all around the world crawling for his new search engine and running the algorithms for ranking the results. By using end-users computers, Wikia’s computing power could quickly surpass that of Google’s massive network.
Secondly, Jimmy plans on having an army of volunteers that will untangle the search results, especially for queries that could have more than one meaning; like apple/Apple and to keep out the spam sites. This could make the search results more relevant than Google’s.
However, not everyone is happy with Jimmy. Neosmart is calling Jimmy’s new project an “Outrageous Exploitation of the Human Race”.
Imagine if Jimmy Wales beats out the giant Google!
Want to know more about Jimmy Wales?
Jimmy is involved with the Blogger’s Code Of Conduct and had a rough time with legal issues
Wikipedia article defames golf pro
Rynert
“it’s just about as authoritative as one can find online considering that it touches on hundreds of thousands of topics.”
As long as the subject does not involve politcs, religion or opinion…