Jimmy Wales, founder of the immensely popular Wikipedia, has decided to build a rival search engine to compete with Google. He calls his new search engine Wikiasari.
Like Wikipedia, the new search engine will rely on the support of a volunteer community of users. The idea is that Web surfers and programmers will be able to bring their collective intelligence to bear, to fine-tune search results and make the experience more effective for everyone. "If you search in Google, a lot of the results are very, very good and a lot of the results are very, very bad," says Wales. What that shows, Wales says, is that mathematical formulas alone do not produce consistently relevant results. "Human intelligence is still a very important part of the process," he says.
Unlike Wikipedia, Wikiasari is a for-profit venture. Google might have a "dumb" search engine, but they've got a lot of smart people when it comes to making money off of web searches. Let's see if being "smarter" is smarter.