Death to Google?
The other day I came across an interview between Danny Sullivan (formerly of SearchEngineWatch.com, now with SearchEngineLand.com) and Jimmy Wales, chairman of Wikia. In case you didn’t know, Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia. And if you don’t know what Wikipedia is, you really should come out from under that rock occasionally (it’s really nice out here!)
What the interview is about is an ambitious new project called “Search Wikia,” where Wales and his team will apply what they’ve learned from running the world’s largest and most authoritative collaborative content site. They’ll use those lessons to build a search engine that they hope will shape into a big, bad “Google-Killer”.
The full plan hasn’t been formulated yet, and Wales admits that in already talking to the press that he might have let the cat out of the bag before they were ready to have any real public scrutiny of the project. They hope to muster the same sort of passionate human community around their new search engine as they’ve built up around Wikipedia.
In theory, it seems like a nice enough idea. Right?
Yes and no. What I really loved was that Sullivan pulls no punches when discussing what he feels are the shortcomings in Wales’ ideas. He discusses what he perceives to be Wales’ short-sightedness on the realities involved with running a world-class search site. Especially the nitty-gritty details of what actual physical hardware and funding is required to get the job done.
Sullivan does say that he’s hopeful that — even though he doubts “Search Wikia” actually put Google out of business — the community-participation aspects could certainly make some interesting changes to the search industry.
I know I’ll be watching!
The link to that article is here:
http://searchengineland.com/061229-193718.php
One more note about Wikipedia. As I was writing this up, I came across another article just this week about how Wikipedia will be re-instating the policy of making all outbound links use the “nofollow” attribute in response to widespread abuse by spammers. Normally, vandalizing Wikipedia in order to leech PageRank isn’t worth it, because a human editor will catch you.
But this past holiday season, a ton of sites had SEO Contests with prizes like info-product packages and even cash. In those cases, you have a bunch of unscrupulous SEO practitioners who want high-PR page rank and they want it fast, and they don’t care if it’s temporary. So unethical marketers would then “vandalize” Wikipedia entries with unrelated links in the hopes of catching a spider before a human editor removed the offending link.
And how do I put this….that just SUCKS!
What that means is the ton of people who have built real, informative entries about their businesses and services now have the value of that investment taken away from them. Hopefully, this measure will only be temporary, as it was the last time Wikipedia used “nofollow”. I know it’s a waste to hope that unethical marketers will knock off this kind of activity, because they aren’t likely to stop. I just hope that the people who sponsor these SEO Contests will make it less rewarding to do so and give some thought to the damage such free-for-all contests can cause in the Internet Marketing eco-system.
The link to that article is here:
http://www.ineedhits.com/free-tools/blog/2007/01/wikipedia-fights-black-hat-seo-with.aspx
Posted by Brad Fallon on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 3:12 pm 
This idea of a community-driven or people-powered search sounds very similar to what Scott Jones is already doing with his new ChaCha search engine.
Tim
Art and Design Directory
Wikipedia is new and up and coming but it is not in googles category yet. It might get their but I really don’t see it.
Lets see…if Microsoft hasn’t done it yet, what makes you think that Wiki will?
Secondly, I don’t think G will set there and do nothing.
Your thoughts?
Surely these SEO Contest sponsors will put an end to spamming as a way of winning the competitions. Or, is that too obvious?
Larry
Wedding Favors Emporium
One option wikipedia could take is somehow making a voting system whether to decide if or not an external link gets the nofollow attribute or not. And with those votes, some editors may have more ‘authority/weight’ as to if the link receives the tag or not.
Elegant Wedding Favors
I am in hopes of someone coming up with a new search engine to run against Google. But I think that Google has been around to long and have gotten to big for anyone to really compete against them.
Like the other post, if Microsoft hasn’t done anything like this, they are about the only ones out there that could. But I can always cross my fingers!
Audio Books For Everyone
MSN’s search engine is nice… It still needs some work but it’s getting better.
Some people are already ahead of it all, but still fairly new.
Here a good article on what its all about.
http://aheroaday.squarespace.com/home/2007/2/6/tall-street-how-a-virtual-free-market-helps-out-the-little-guy.html
Personally I am fed up of seeing Wiki every time I do a search for something on Google. It wont be long before Google sandboxes the site and at that point ill through a party.
I mean there are 10 listings on page 1 and wiki has just made that 9 listings now. if im looking for a car then why the heck would I want to read about Wiki car in description.
I find alot of wikipedia results in the searches i do. I dont like it so much, but hey search engines like content and wikipedia certainly has a lot of that. i used wikipedia for research on the coin collecting site i have. It was a great place to gather the facts and figures for the various coin articles that were written.
were all states given 1000 dollar bills to circulate
I find alot of wikipedia results in the searches i do. I dont like it so much, but hey search engines like content and wikipedia certainly has a lot of that. i used wikipedia for research on the coin collecting site i have. It was a great place to gather the facts and figures for the various coin articles that were written.
were all states given 1000 dollar bills to circulate
Wikipedia continues to be a powerful, even with the recent change where they added the no follow tags to external links.
Wedding Party Favors
I agree with Jim in the sense that its quite obvious that certain terms are going to fall under a so called encyclopedia type search and yes thats what encyclopedias and dictionaries are for. Yes I’m sure we all love wikipedia for the excellent way they lay out content but there are legitimate companies that deserve a spot on Google’s page 1 and I feel its just a matter of time before Google realizes that there are only 9 search results on page 1 and 10 on page 2. Maybee wikipedia could use a good seo as i see them #2 for encyclopedia and #15 for the word dictionary.
Wikipedia is notorious for having awful information. I think they should be concentrating on fact checking first.
We’ll see what happens but I doubt they’ll have much success, Google is an 8 Billion Pound Gorilla!
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