New Article - Jimbo Wales And People Powered Search: A Long Shot

[thejenn]

Authored by: Gord Hotchkiss

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/hot.../0319_gh1.html

A Snippet:

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is placing a fairly large bet that people can trump technology in the search engine game. He's putting $4 million (of other people�s money) plus an undisclosed "large amount" from Amazon on the line, betting that he can steal 5% of the total search market away from Google with his new project, Wikia.

[mosxu]

Walles is at search engines mercy. In my opinion search engine should not allow his website to take over the results. I find it unfair and not professional to outrank websites dedicated to a certain subject and being specialists in that subject whereby wikipedia is dealing with all the subjects in the world aren't they? Quality of search is affected in my opinion.

Secondly I heard rumors they have introduced "rel=nofollow" , poor webmasters putting so much effort to write good content for a link back and do they get? "rel=nofollow"

[Logan]

Welcome aboard mosxu

Those rumors you heard about rel=nofollow are true

Regarding wikia search, I do not understand how people can even comment on it since so little has even been defined or communicated about this. If you follow the email list from wikia, where the project is discussed, its clear to me that very little has defined. From the email list earlier this week -

I plan
to respond tomorrow morning to some of the interesting emails on this
list over the last few days and post a set of practical steps that I
think we want to focus on first. (Simple API type stuff so that people
can start working/thinking about tools for editors, etc.)

--Jimbo

Unfortunately Jim has not responded yet as he said above, but since practical steps haven't even been communicated yet ... I think most comments are more about speculation of "what people think it could be" versus "what it will be".