Wikipedia founder to launch search engine
Steve Safran December 26th, 2006
Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, is going to start up his own search engine. Wales has the backing of Amazon.com, and is calling the new search Wikiasari. (”asari” is Japanese for “rummaging search.” Nice.) According to the Times, the project has major funding from Amazon and a group of Silicon Valley VCs. Wales is calling out Google too, with a little trash talk: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” the Times quotes him as saying. If anyone else were to launch a new search, I’d say they were doomed to failure. But Wales may just put up an interesting alternative. (More information here.)
3 Comments Add your own
1. thedetroitchannel | December 26th, 2006 at 7:13 am
did anyone ever think that google likes the search process a little cumbersome?
if it gave you exact results for every entry your visits wouldn’t last as long, nor would they serve up as many google ads as they do now.
“china” might have been a better example than “tampa hotels”; you know not if you’ll get results for the dinnerware, the country, or the female wrestler.
2. Andrew Tyndall | December 27th, 2006 at 6:40 am
So I took the bait and performed that “Tampa hotels” search. I did not find any crap. All the results on the first page were on topic. What is all the fuss about?
But who wants to stay in Tampa anyway?
3. Ratboy | January 19th, 2008 at 5:26 am
Wow, thanks for the excellent information!
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