Categories: Articles

Search Engines… Oh, The Humanity

The struggles to Search Engine Optimize a website continues. As Universal Search (aka blended search) continues to proliferate the organic search results, and as Google dances and futzes with algorithms and other neat stuff that freaks out anybody and everybody who builds a website, Jimmy Wales (the guy behind Wikipedia) has rebooted his own search project, Wikia Search.

Here’s what CNET‘s Rafe Needleman had to say about it on June 3rd, 2008 in his news item, Wikia Search Launches The Hackable Search Engine:

"Starting today, if you do a search on the engine and don’t like the results, you’ll be able to change them. Your changes will apply not just for yourself, but rather for everybody.

The engine will launch with a smallish subset of machine-indexed pages, about 30 million, which will form the baseline that Wikia Search will let users go to town on. It’s ‘hardly a full crawl’ of the Web, admits Wikia (and Wikipedia) co-founder Jimmy Wales, but it’s a start.

The editing you can do on Wikia Search is extensive. If you think a result on a search result page is too low or too high in the listings, you can influence its position by rating it. You can delete entries entirely or hand-write new ones. You can also rewrite the text of a search result, including adding code to the result (to insert, perhaps, a site-specific search, like Google’s search-within-search)."

I gave it a shot. I liked what I saw and, as usual, I’m frustrated that I didn’t think of a search engine that works like this.

No, it’s not the Semantic Web we’re all waiting for, but it’s a nice hybrid – it blends the technological code of search, but empowers individual’s to add, criticize and fix.

So, should you be scared that it’s going to become fully polluted by the evil doers of the Web? I’d like to think that there will only be some malicious activity (ok, there will probably a lot) , but if the same good group (generally) who helped build Wikipedia dig in deep and expand the circle of friends, this could well be a project we should all keep our eyes on.

You can check out Wikia Search in action. Wales put together a video demo. Click to view.

For the record, check out the video… it will blow you away. People, let’s use this amazing tool for good (not evil)… Please.

Search Engines are getting more and more human… it’s a good day for fans of the Internet.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.