Author Archives: eddie a. tejeda

people-powered search (part 1)

Last week, the London Times reported that the Wikipedia founder, Jimbo Wales, was announcing a new search engine called “Wikiasari.” This search engine would incorporate a new type of social ranking system and would rival Google and Yahoo in potential ad revenue. When the news first got out, the blogosphere went into a frenzy; many echoing inaccurate information – mostly in excitement – causing lots confusion. Some sites even printed dubious screenshots of what they thought was the search engine.
Alas, there were no real screenshots and there was no search engine… yet. Yesterday, unable to make any sense what was going on by reading the blogs, I looked through the developer mailing list and found this post by Jimmy Wales:

The press coverage this weekend has been a comedy of errors. Wikiasari was not and is not the intended name of this project… the London Times picked that off an old wiki page from back in the day when I was working on the old code base and we had a naming contest for it. […] And then TechCrunch ran a screenshot of something completely unrelated, thus unfortunately perhaps leading people to believe that something is already built about about to be unveiled. No, the point of the project is to build something, not to unveil something which has already been built.

And in the Wikia search webpage he explains why:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken. Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.

So there is no Google-killer just yet, but something is brewing.
From the details that we have so far, we know that this new search engine will be funded by Wikia Inc, Wales’ for-profit and ad-driven MediaWiki hosting company. We also know that the search technology will be based on Nutch and Lucene – the same technology that powers Wikipedia’s search. And we also know that the search engine will allow users to directly influence search results.
I found interesting that in the Wikia “about page”, Wales suggests that he has yet to make up his mind on how things are going to work, so suggestions appear to be welcome.
Also, during the frenzy, I managed to find many interesting technologies that I think might be useful in making a new kind of search engine. Now that a dialog appears to be open and there is good reason to believe a potentially competitive search engine could be built, current experimental technologies might play an important role in the development of Wikia’s search. Some questions that I think might be useful to ponder are:
Can current social bookmarking tools, like del.icio.us, provide a basis for determining “high quality” sites? Will using Wikipedia and it’s external site citing engine make sense for determining “high quality” links? Will using a Digg-like, rating system result spamless or simply just low brow results? Will a search engine dependant on tagging, but no spider be useful? But the question I am most interested in is whether a large scale manual indexing lay the foundation for what could turn into the Semantic Web (Web 3.0)? Or maybe just Web 2.5?
The most obvious and most difficult challenge for Wikia, besides coming up with a good name and solid technology, will be with dealing with sheer size of the internet.
I’ve found that open-source communities are never as large or as strong as they appear. Wikipedia is one of the largest and one of the most successful online collaborative projects, yet just over 500 people make over 50% of all edits and about 1400 make about 75% of all edits. If Wikia’s new search engine does not generate a large group of users to help index the web early on, this project will not survive; A strong online community, possibly in a magnitude we’ve never seen before, might be necessary to ensure that people-powered search is of any use.

reading buildings

On Monday, Adriene Jenik, who is Associate Professor of Computer & Media Arts at UC San Diego, stopped by for what turned into an interesting discussion on the future of libraries. Adriene is a telecommunications media artist who has experimented extensively in virtual performance with projects like Desktop Theater and SPECFLIC, an ongoing “speculative distributed cinema project.”
More recently, she wrote and produced SPECFLIC 2.0, which explores the intersection of digital media, books, and reading. With the help of a large network of collaborating artists, Jenik transformed the Martin Luther King Library in San Jose into a one night only vision of the future called the InfoSphere, where a computerized reference librarian called The Infospherian provides an interface to all the bits of information what anyone might need, and is in charge of issuing and enforcing reading licenses to the public.
Before the group got to discussing how libraries where changing, Adriene and I first discussed how neighborhoods and cities develop; the way growth is encouraged and discouraged in certain areas, and of those who benefit from seeing either scenario play out.
As in the discussion we had about neighborhoods, I am ambivalent towards the way libraries are changing. People use search engines to find information quickly and are less frequently doing research in libraries. In fact, even in libraries computer labs tend to be the most populous rooms. The act of looking through physical books lends itself well to serendipitous discoveries, and while I agree that many of these kinds of experiences may be lost, it’s hard to really know for sure what is gained and what is lost when you’re in the midst of change.
For better or worse, as a tool, the library, as we know it today, appears to have lived out it’s life. In the future, the idea of a library as a museum, as opposed to an active location like a park makes a lot more sense to me. Something will be lost with the transition, that is for sure, and as much of it as possible should be preserved, but it’s hard to see today’s library being able to compete with the technologies of the future in the same way.
What I find bizarre about all this is that when you walk into a Barnes & Noble all the seats are taken, so it seems that “reading buildings” of some sort have some demand. Maybe it’s the social setting or maybe it’s the Starbucks. Actually, that could be the future of the library: a big empty building that people bring their electronic books to so that they can read and drink their coffee in a social setting… quietly.
“No analog book allowed inside library. Please digitize your analog book at the door.”