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.
When I do a Google search, I want my own terms to be the only net cast. I do not want the intervening (confounding) variable of someone else's judgement. If this means that I need to sift through results, that's fine. An experienced Google user generally can find what they are looking for within the first couple of pages or first couple of search tries. I absolutely would not want to have someone else's interpretation of what they think I am looking for color my search.
Good Luck, Jimmy - you may stay afloat, but you won't beat out Google.
Jimmy Wales thinks improvement will come in the form of "social search". Fred Wilson (http://avc.blogs.com) says at least one other prominent company is working on something similar. If you disagree, you might like Powerset's approach better. They recently raised a ton of money to work on a natural language search algorithm that understands the difference between "who acquired company X" and "whom did company X acquire".
With progress being made in both directions, I think the value of a high Google Pagerank will inevitably diminish over time.
Social searching seems inevitable to fail, insofar as overpowering google, due to the issues addressed by Miriam. It might get off to a good start, but I can foresee it diminishing over time as people realize you're more likely to get relevant results using google and carefully selected wording. This is also a problem with natural language search engines. For a long time people have touted natural language searches as being the "magic bullet" for our present search system. Time and time again they fail for numerous reasons that I won't bother to get into here. It almost saddens me to see people still trying to push natural language searching and people continuing to back it up. A combination of the two could have some merit, however it will always be more convenient, overall, to use our current system. (however full boolean search capabilities with google WOULD be nice :))
The point isn't whether Google will hold up against Wikiasari or Powerset specifically. It's whether current search technologies have reached the pinnacle of effectiveness. And it seems you agree the answer is no - which means there's room for someone else to improve on Google's algorithm?
BTW, remember the pre-Google Internet? Once upon a time, even Yahoo! was a directory rather than a search engine. People back then didn't clamor for the search technologies that we now have, because they didn't know about them. By the same token, I'm not sure it'll *always* be more convenient to use our current system. We'll just have to wait and see! :)
As far as SEO goes, always keep your customers loyal (and the word of mouth rapid) and do not rely on SEO so heavily.
Here are a couple of thoughts:
Google can always improve (though on its own terms, not by becoming something different) - as long as it does not reduce results automatically and only offers the option of including limiters and/or other modifiers as the searcher desires.
The reason I spoke of Wikisari not 'beating out' Google, was because of Jimmy Wales' tone when speaking of his new venture. If he had phrased his comments along the lines of 'we are trying something different, and it may be useful to some people in some cases', I would not have even made the comment - or would have phrased it differently. His vibe was much closer to 'here's something that is going to be better than Google' - hence my comments. My issue wasn't regarding a 'winner' - it was regarding whether his model was going to be an improvement on Google. There is obviously plenty of room for different models of search - just each one on its own terms, and for different purposes.
Oh, and I do remember the pre-Google internet. Google hasn't changed much from the likes of Webcrawler and Altavista of the days of yore. The web just wasn't as "mainstream" as it has become today, hence the "clamor for search technologies". Oh, and I didn't mean that our current system will always be the most convenient, however it will always be the most convenient in relation to the other proposed search systems that are essentially word driven (I do enjoy my idea from above though ;)). This isn't to say that their algorithms cannot be improved upon (as i stated, full boolean search capabilities would be preferable) but the best system will always be that akin to Google's and Microsoft's and Yahoo's until there is a profound advancement of the physical technology itself.
Before we reach neuro-responsive search, maybe we'll have Pleo-like search, where different people get different results based on their previous web browsing behavior? And instead of the kind of social search that Jimmy Wales envisions, maybe there'll be an Amazon-like recommendation engine running in the background, matching you with results that were clicked on by people whose past clickstreams are similar to yours?
Already in dziningspot.blogspot.com I talked about Previewseek a user friendly Search Engine that vanished overtime.
Similarly I am skeptical as how long Jimmy Wales human-powered search engine will be. Well, anyway nothing is permanent in Search Technology all the best to Wikiasari.
And AnooX has patents pending on People powered search results, so should Wiki copies Anoox as they say they are going to do, I am sure Anoox will sued them and will likely win.
Now as far as results of Anoox, overall I think it is the best search results, not always, but most the time.
But there are other reasons Anoox is I think the up and coming search engine to do to Google what Google did to Yahoo, they are:
1- Anoox is Open & decentralized
2- Anoox is not-for-profit
In fact our company has cut its Ad expenses by like $2000 per month since when we started Advertising on Anoox.
I just checked them out, and I think it is really cool :)
Thanks for telling us about them.
I wonder why I have not read much about them in the Press!!!
What I specially liked about Anoox is their promise that they will be in the search engine business only and not enter any other business.
As a small business owner I can tell you that I am terrified of any day Google or Yahoo entering our business and killing us for sure.
So it is a breath of fresh air to see that there is a search engine like Anoox which is democratically generated by the Knowledge of the people and which puts the benefit of the search engine community ahead of their profits. Anoox has my Vote.