Everybody is talking about Wikiasari today. I first read about the Times of London story on Paul Kedrosky’s blog. Then I noticed posts on Pulse 2.0, HipMojo and Mashable and ZDNet as well.
Wikiasari will be a human-powered search engine. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is getting ready to take on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Windows Live Search because “the basic task of a search engine is to make a decision: this page is good, this page sucks. Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments… but we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. It only takes a second to figure out if a page is good, so the key is to build a community of trust.“
Initial reports indicated that Amazon would be a partner in the Wikiasari, but Wales has clarified that Amazon has no role beyond its recent investment in Wikia, Wikipedia’s commercial arm. Amazon’s involvement would make sense though. Wikiasari could leverage the uber-cheap labor pool on the Mechanical Turk (which already powers Askville, Amazon’s new Q&A service) to sort search results.
BTW, remember Jimmy Wales’ other recent announcement? He plans to set content free by offering free bandwidth, free storage space and free software.
Earlier today, I was talking to Jason Bates from Greenlush about SEO. Unfortunately for Greenlush (not to mention every other hosting company) Wales’ new projects might end up pushing both its business model and a major source of new customers into irrelevance.
