Information and Rummaging

Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales is planning to launch a new search engine next year, called Wikiasari. As a third division of Wikia, Wales has raised over $4 million, including a donation from Amazon (Amazon has nothing to do with this new venture), and would surely be a great success as large as Wikipedia. He says,

…Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that…

Wikiasari’s awkward name derives from the word wiki, and asari, a Japanese word meaning to rummage around. Why rummage?

Read!

A library is full of published books, and it’d be a perfect place for doing research. Made by identifiable people and organizations, it’s a reliable source for knowledge (information, facts and skills obtained by a person through their own experience or by education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject).

What we see in libraries nowadays are computers, and although we know that the internet is a faster growing source of information, compared to the books in the library, we still use both resources. Why? The internet is full of diamonds, as well as just lumps of coal. The sad thing is, the coal is the majority over diamonds on the internet, and what we do every day is trying to find the diamonds, through methods that have become part of our lifestyle, to Google search.

Google isn’t always reliable.

Sometimes all we get is crap and we never get to the results we really want. It’s both because there’s not so much quality over the quantity on that content, but may be because of how Google’s search system is computer generated. It’s generated by one source of information generation.

Think. Now what makes a library such a good source? Firstly because books are more reliable. Second, because the skilled librarians pick out what’s actually good. And a community similar to this is a wiki.

Wikiasari would be depending on real people to show effective results, which will make it easier for us to find the diamonds out of the coal. While Google first started to try to organize all the information that we can access, and then Wikiasari, will be making that information more useful for us.

I personally do not believe that Wikiasari would be some kind of competition against Google or any other search engine. It’s like comparing tangerines with bananas. They’re both good in their own ways, and its nothing like a competition. So I don’t believe in how everyone would be using Wikiasari. It’s just one good option for an alternative, that’s all.

*[Wikiasari is the name of the former project and will not be the name of the new search engine. Amazon and Wikipedia have nothing to do with this project]*