User Powered Search

The power of open source seems to be well accepted now. Whats more, sites like Wikipedia, Digg and Delicious have shown that users are willing to put in a reasonable amount of time to generate great and useful content. Blogs too seem to be playing their ( Questionable ? ) part in the Web 2.0 revolution. And so, it is not surprising that a similar user driven approach has taken over ( well almost ) search:

Jimmy Wales announced plans to develop the search engine, to be named "Wikiasari," or "Wikia," for short, in a December 23 online posting.

Full article here

We're thrilled to tell you that the search for your own search engine is over. Today (10/23/2006 10:04:00 PM) we are launching the Google Custom Search Engine. As you might imagine, it's a simple and straightforward product to use and understand. In a matter of minutes you can create a search engine that reflects your knowledge and interests; looks and feels like your own; and, if you choose, you can make money from the traffic you receive through Google's AdSense program. You can even invite your friends and trusted community members to add to and help build your search engine.

Full article here

The fact that Google released their Custom Search Engine soon after Jimmy Wales announced Wikia is not shocking, what is shocking is the fact that they did so on the same day ( true - check the dates ) !!!

Wikia is, to my knowledge, still in development. The idea of opening up search is not something that's new. Amazon's Alexa Web Search Platform ( which is still in the Beta Phase ) has been offering users access to their crawl data for a while now. The difference however is similar to the difference between creating your own website and having a blog. All the worry of having to write code is replaced by having to worry about the way in which you want to have data accessed. In fact "collective intelligence" powered search has been called Search 2.0 for a while, but Google Co-op is bound to change all that.

I intend to talk a little more about Google Co-op in my upcoming posts.

This should be an interesting phase of search evolution.