Wikipedia founder says to challenge Google, Yahoo
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The on-line collaboration responsible for  Wikipedia plans to build a search engine to rival those of  Google Inc.  and Yahoo Inc. , the founder of  the popular Internet encyclopaedia said on Thursday.
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Google Founders Interviewed by Barbara Walters  Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were interviewed last night by Barbara Walters on ABC's 20/20 10 Most Fascinating People. Andy Beal who doesn't seem to be too fond of Barbara Wawa pointed this out on his SearchEngineLowdown blog. I was too busy eating ...
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Jimmy Wales' Wikia Search will open to the public next week with an eye toward improving search by letting users tweak search results in a fashion similar to how users edit entries on Wikipedia.
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Search Wikia, the widely awaited search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is slated to make its official debut today.
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(InfoWorld) - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is targeting the fourth quarter of this year for the unveiling of an open-source search engine that he hopes could challenge the dominance of market-leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. The project is being run through Wikia Inc., a for-profit company founded by Wales that seeks to use a similar model to the Wikipedia community-written and edited encyclopedia. He hopes to provide the tools and technology to allow programmers across the Internet to collaborate on the development and testing of a search engine and make the results freely available. "The essential core principles are that I think search is now a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet and it's really fundamental to society as a whole and therefore as citizens of the world we should be concerned about it being a secretive black box," he said. Efforts to create open search engines aren't new but one of the stumbling blocks they face is a difficulty in running large-scale tests of the search algorithm, said Wales. The algorithm is the code that sits at the heart of the search engine and is responsible for its accuracy or lack thereof. "To create a full-scale crawling spider of the Web actually requires a great deal of investment in hardware," he said. Wikia is planning to provide resources to enable full-scale crawling of the World Wide Web so the software can be fully tested and tuned. The project is still in the planning stages and Wales expects that the first test version due this year will help programmers spot bugs that occur with real-world usage and speed up the development process. "Probably what we'll do is launch something in the fourth quarter of this year with a really big warning 'It sucks, we know it sucks, it's experimental, don't panic. This is just an experiment to show what could be and now we're going to start working to see how we could make it better'," he said. Already the project is attracting attention, not just from engineers who want to lend a hand but from companies that are already offering search engines. "We are getting a lot of interest from second-tier search players who are really interested in some of the alternatives that might be available. If you're not one of the top three or four you've got to really wonder how could you ever catch up with Google and their billions of dollars. This provides kind of a level playing field where lots of people can contribute," said Wales. Wales cites a story he heard about research done on search results. In the study users were presented with results from Google and Yahoo but with the brand names switched, so the Google name was above the Yahoo results and vice versa. In most cases users picked the Google-branded results as better, he said. "To me this shows a great vulnerability if Google is only competing on brand image," said Wales. "If good quality search results are becoming a commodity, if the problem of search is in some sense solved then if I can make that free it really changes the structure of competition on the Internet." "We'll give away all the technology, all the data. Release everything under a free license because in my view the idea has been very solidly proven wrong by Wikipedia that in order to out-compete on the Internet you need to have a walled garden of special content no one else has. Wikipedia gives everything away. You can download the database and put up a clone of Wikipedia tomorrow. All that means is that more people find out about the brand, more people drive traffic back," he said. Even if multiple competitors spring up using the Wikia search engine he's hopeful the Wikia site can still grab a 2 percent or 3 percent share of the search market and so would become "a pretty decent little business." But just how successful the search engine is will depend on more than just its accuracy. The search algorithm is the most closely guarded secret of companies like Google because it determines how high a particular site is ranked. If the algorithm is public then it would mean site owners could precisely tune their sites for high rankings and that's sure to attract the attention of spammers. Wales hopes a community effort will result in a black list of abusers to keep the results clean. "If published algorithms make it too easy for spammers to game the system then we've got a real problem and my whole idea won't work," he said.
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InfoWorld - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is targeting the fourth quarter of this year for the unveiling of an open-source search engine that he hopes could challenge the dominance of market-leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.
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Criticizing Google and Yahoo as not transparent enough, Jimmy Wales plans an open-source search project that allows more user input.
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The founder of Wikipedia on Friday urged contributors to the free Internet encyclopedia to put more emphasis on quality instead of quantity.
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Just came across Citizendium today which is taking advantage of the problems of spam and altered reality at Wikipedia by positioning itself as being more accurate &#038; accountable. The project, started by [Larry Sanger] a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding &#8220;gentle expert oversight&#8221; and requiring contributors to use their real [...]
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New year will see launch of open-source Wikipedia search project the company hopes will challenge Google, others.
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By Brad Hem, Houston Chronicle  Jun. 2--Four Houston entrepreneurs are launching a search engine today that they hope will challenge the likes of Google and Yahoo.
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InfoWorld - Search Wikia, the widely awaited search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is slated to make its official debut on Monday, with the bet that an open-source, community-driven effort can disrupt and reshape this Google-dominated market.
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Online search engine upstart Vivisimo Inc. is setting out to persuade the masses that Google Inc...
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Will Google ever launch Knol, its wiki-plus-Blogger experiment? It is being compared to Wikipedia and Mahalo, with a focus on the author.
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Efforts by countries like China to restrict the exchange of information on the Internet are ultimately doomed to failure, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told an audience of Stanford University students Tuesday.&quot;I don&#39;t see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet,&quot; he said. &quot;You cannot control the Internet.&quot;China has grappled with the issue of Internet censorship&#160;in recent years and Microsoft, along with several other U.S. companies, has come under fire for aiding in this effort. In late 2005,&#160;Microsoft shut down the blog of journalist Zhao Jing, also known as Michael Anti, when he blogged about a newspaper strike in the country.In the long run, however, free speech will win out, Gates said.That&#39;s because of business requirements. Restrictions on free speech will curtail business activity and so commercial forces will work against censorship, Gates said. &quot;If your country wants to have a developed economy... you basically have to open up the Internet,&quot; he said.Gates made the comments following a talk on &quot;Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Giving Back,&quot; which focused mainly on his two favorite topics: the future of technology and the philanthropic goals he has set for himself following his retirement from day to day work at the company he founded in 1975.Microsoft&#39;s founder will step down&#160;from his daily work at the company entirely in July, but he has set some big follow-up goals for himself: including the fight against HIV/AIDS and a campaign to eradicate polio and malaria.Another ambition is to find new ways to&#160;drive innovation that will benefit the world&#39;s poorest countries.This is a major problem, Gates said. Today, with millions still dying from malaria, 90 percent of the world&#39;s medical research relates to conditions that occur in the world&#39;s richest countries. &quot;Consider how much money should be spent on baldness versus malaria,&quot; he said.Fifty times the amount spent on researching malaria goes to finding a cure for baldness, he said.&quot;We have this disparity where, as great as our system is, if there&#39;s not a market need, it doesn&#39;t drive innovation.&quot;Gates would like to see that change.&quot;One of the things I&#39;ll be spending time on is reaching out to both universities and companies and encouraging them to get more involved in this,&quot; he said.The 52 year-old Gates seemed apprehensive about his upcoming career as a philanthropist. Stepping down from Microsoft &quot;could be traumatic for me,&quot; he said. &quot;I was 17 years old when I started working full-time on Microsoft and I&#39;ve done it basically every day of work since then. So who knows what it will be like to make the change.&quot;&#160;
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(InfoWorld) - The Internet has an ever-growing role to play in allowing free expression across the globe, but only if attempts to reign it in are unsuccessful, Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said Tuesday. Schmidt, speaking in Washington, D.C., warned his audience that the Internet will continue to create public policy challenges asÂ another billion users move online in the coming years. One reaction to a perceived loss of privacy and to new Internet users questioning repressive governments will be to clamp down on information, he said. "[That approach] appeals to people who prize order over everything else," said Schmidt, speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's launch of a global think tank. "Those people exist everywhere." Schmidt acknowledged that a completely free flow of information over the Internet can be messy, but an unfettered Internet gives people the best information, he said. "The Internet has empowered people in a way we've never seen before. What we say at Google is, 'Don't bet against the Internet.'" he said In the coming years, governments will have to deal with a series of questions as more people come online, he said. The second billion Internet users will often compare the way their countries govern with other governments, he predicted. "They're going to see their government has been treating them badly," he said. "They're going to be annoyed." Some governments will struggle with how much free expression is too much, he said. Even in Western democracies, such as France and Germany, posting information about the Nazi Party is prohibited, Schmidt said, and other governments will struggle with what expression to allow. Schmidt said he hopes governments will err on the side of freedom, but free expression will continue to be a hot debate in coming years. "Have we gained more freedom than we want?" he said. "Freedom of choice may be more choice than people want." And with computers able to store more and more information, governments will struggle with the idea of privacy, Schmidt added. Many people will eventually regret rants or photos put online 20 or 30 years earlier. "What happens to personal privacy when everything that's created exists forever?" he said. "My daughter calls this 'too much sharing in your early life.'" The Internet creates paradoxes, Schmidt said. It creates a global marketplace, but it also allows people to segment themselves into tribes, he said. It allows the truth to emerge faster than with other mediums, but it also allows users to spread false information. "If you don't like a piece of information, spread some information," he said of the attitude of many Internet users. "People here wouldn't do that." When he heard groans from the Washington crowd, Schmidt amended his statement. "I should say, people in this room wouldn't do that," he said. Despite the policy questions, Schmidt encouraged the audience to work for ways to open information up to more people across the globe. "Globalization is fundamentally about universal access to information," he said. "This information revolution that's coming can be shaped."
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Software giant eyes search pioneer to bolster its competition with Google.