Scouring the internet this week for vaguely interesting websites (no, not that sort of ‘interesting’) I came across a couple of gems that can only be described as little bits of online wheat amongst the copious amounts of web chaff.
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Reverse image searching? What?
Thursday, June 4th, 2009Will social media ever expand to search?
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
Wikipedia will no doubt be happy to hear of the death of Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia, but it’s not all been good news for Jimmy Wales this week. Wikia has quietly pulled the plug on Wikia Search, its attempt at putting social media into search.
For those who didn’t know, Wikia Search was an attempt to bring Wikipedia’s user contribution model to a search engine. Results could be rated, inserted and edited: a nice idea, but not popular: it was getting just 10,000 unique users per month. So slightly less than Google, then.
Wales said Wikia Search was shuttered due to the economy, but I suspect the problem lies deeper than that. The difference between Wikia Search and any big social network is that search is simply about getting to the page you need, fast, and you’re not going to beat Google for speed. But you’re on Facebook because you want to be there: anywhere that your friends take you from there with Publisher links is a bonus.
A social media enabled search presents all sorts of problems: not least that self-editing could be even more abused. Is there a way to offer speed and convenience combined with the peer review nature of search? Google’s SearchWiki is halfway there, letting you rank your own results, but it’s not shared. We’re not sure there’s a better solution yet but we’ll be using it when we find it.