It’s worth noting here that this is far from the first attempt at human-assisted search. Some have pointed out that the very first “search engines” predate the Internet by decades and are still around; they’re called librarians. Yahoo lets users participate in its popular Yahoo Answers search; users submit questions, and other users submit answers. Others have also used the open source approach; Nutch, for example, is built on Lucene Java.
To cover just a few of the engines I’ve reviewed here that qualify, Mahalo.com presents users with results that have been painstakingly put together by humans. Social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us and Searchles benefit from a community of users saving their favorite sites and letting everyone search everyone else’s bookmarks. Some search engines, like Spock, still in closed beta, work a bit like Wikipedia in that anyone can alter entries – but Spock is specialized for searching for people.
So Wales isn’t quite the first, but he is perhaps the first to dream quite this big. He thinks Wikia Search will be able to capture five percent of the search market – and he believes this will actually benefit the bigger search players. “Google will be much better off if search becomes ubiquitous and there are lots of players because that doesn’t threaten their dominance in the advertising market,” he explained. “Google is much better off with lots of players and being the ad broker fore everyone, because ad brokerage is a defensible business.”
Whether Google will see it this way remains an open question. Of course, Wikia Search might not catch on at all, rendering the point moot. The possibility of failure doesn’t seem to weigh too heavily on Wales though. “I could fail. I have no idea. But I’m going to have fun trying,” he said. “I just want to do something cool.”
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