CYBERSPACE — Gone are the days when mega eggheads would prove their intellectual superiority by solving the Rubik’s Cube for their baffled but impressed friends. Today the true brainiac dreams of creating the perfect search engine — or at least that’s one of the sugar plums dancing in Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ head at night.With financial assistance from online retailer Amazon.com and other tech companies, Wales’ for-profit Wikia corporation plans to unleash a search engine upon the internet that will harness the same user-driven forces that make the Wikipedia the current online reference tool to be reckoned with.
Wales pointed out the obvious to the Times Online recently, observing that “the revenue model for search is advertising” and expects his brainchild to be no different. His hope, however, is that the combined forces of user-driven transparency and the popularity of his Wikipedia will convert to valuable online dollar signs when his search engine prepares to dive into the deep end of the internet, competing against big boys Google and Yahoo, each of which have a tidy corner on the market of search engine ad bucks.
Among the potential strengths of a user-influenced search engine is an escape from what Wales considers to be a drawback in conventional search engine algorithms. One of the most fundamental tasks assigned to a search engine is to rank the potential value of a series of returned URLs for each information request. According to Wales, “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments,” meaning that anyone with a more efficient way to separate the virtual wheat from the chaff could build the proverbial mouse trap with its requisite beaten path, ideally peopled by users and advertisers.
Although reportedly the most used form of online reference, Wales cautions users who rely upon Wikipedia with a reminder that the entries are only as good as the individuals who post information. Edit wars, intentional information doctoring, and pranks have led some to question the value of the tool. The potential for such abuses within a similarly run search engine may be enough to cool the ardor of some research lovers unless Wales can come up with a way to protect against cooked or distorted results. Additionally, the egalitarian nature of the results may be at odds with its commercial nature, especially if it could lead to the ultimate purchase of the property by a larger corporate entity. Wales is no stranger to this concern, seeing that Wikipedia experienced a strong negative response when its users learned that advertising dollars were being considered as a method for sustaining and expanding the site.
