A couple of weeks ago Nic and Matt posted pics and commentary about the world first public screenshots of the Wikia Search project (also picked up by Mashable and TechCrunch) that were recently shown in Johannesburg. Well, now I see that iCommons has released the video of his whole talk (here). I’ve edited it down to a short clip just about the Search project:
In the clip, Jimmy explains that Wikia is developing a freely licensed search engine, using open source software, to compete directly with Yahoo, Google and all the big search players. It Aims to match or exceed the quality of the major search engines
He also makes a strong “political statement” that it’s not healthy that so much power is in the hands of a few search companies who are secretive about how the information is ranked (other’s think so too).
Lastly, he showed screenshots of the Facebook-like contributor interface, dubbed by others as his “Socialpedia”.
I can’t disagree with any of it. However, I’d rather encourage the mainstream browsers OR search engines to adopt Content Labels as it’s much more scalable and certainly more feasible. http://www.w3.org/2007/powder/
Here it is in plain English http://segala.com/blog/content-labels-explained-in-plain-english/
Hey Paul, thank you for your comment. It’s certainly more scalable and more feasible, although this is the guy who conceptualized an online resource to contain the sum of all human knowledge! Good article on the Segala site.
good thinking Dave…
Eish — pity el techcrunch and mashable didn’t pick this one up…. tried to get them to blog it, but to no avail this time
Haha, that would’ve been shweeeet! Thanks for tryin’ Matthew:)