WikiSeek

The first search engine ( I don't know of any other ) that attempted to bring out the power of User Powered Search was WikiSeak. Some proclaimed this to be the search engine that will eventually challenge Google, some confused this with the upcoming Search Engine WikiSaria ( one that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is said to be rolling out ) and others simply wrote this off as a "waste of time". Whatever the eventual fate of WikiSeek, I believe that it is an important milestone in the evolution of search. So what is WikiSeek?

The WikiSeach about page describes WikiSeek as

About Wikiseek

The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes.

Wikiseek utilizes Searchme's category refinement technology, providing suggested search refinements based on user tagging and categorization within Wikipedia, making results more relevant than conventional search engines.

The first thing that strikes me is that fact that WikiSeek's results will be limited to "Information". Conventional search engines crawl sites with fast changing content, such as blogs, on an almost daily basis and because of the nature of WikiSeek this is something that one can not expect. One would however expect that information seeking queries should produce better results on WikiSeek than they would on conventional search engines. However it turns out that this is not the case either. A search for the query "Indian Independence" across various search engines demonstrates this fact:

WikiSeek

MSN - Live
Yahoo
Google


What is worse is "Searchme's category refinement technology" :

The WikiSeek suggestions:

The Yahoo! suggestions:


Clearly one can not draw any meaningful inferences from this one query alone, but playing around a little will show that WikiSeak is infact lacking in many areas.

What is not clear is if WikiSeek's shortcomings are due to some implementation problems or due to a flaw in the concept of the search engine itself. Fortunatly Google Co-op provides a nice way to check this for oneself. I intend to implement WikiSeek on Google Co-op sometime soon. That should give a better insight into the concept behind WikiSeek.

Of course the fact that the WikiSeek's parent organization shares its name with this blog does not help :-)

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Blog Feedback

The other day I asked Vipul, a friend of mine ( his site , his blog ) to go through my blog. He replied with a mail containing some very interesting points and I thought it appropriate to post them up here. Some of his comments reflect his personal tastes but not all. So here goes :



Here are some comments on your blog:
http://search-search-and-searchme.blogspot.com/

First of all, I must confess that this is not the kind of blogging style that I am comfortable with, and hence my comments are coloured by my personal discomfort. It is possible that for the target audiences that your blog is aimed at, the points that I raise are not applicable.

Things I am somewhat uneasy with:

* Your blog posts don't clearly define, or explain, much of the new terms and jargon they introduce. Rather, they coolly and unceremoniously point to links. Moreover, it often happens that visiting the link pointed at only serves to confuse rather than clarify because it goes to a very general page.

The high linkedness of your page is to be appreciated (and it's probably one of the desirable features in modern blogging) but I am always more contented with a blog post that makes complete sense even without a person bothering to follow any of the links. Of course, this may further depend on the background of the person. For instance, a person who is anyway up-to-date on the latest products and services offered by Google and Microsoft may not have to follow many of the links. Depending on the kind of audience you are aiming at, I think you should seek to make the blog post self-contained for that audience (or at least, the person's understanding of one sentence should not depend on having gone to a link in an earlier sentence).

* Your blog posts are too short. Again, a matter of personal taste. I prefer longer blog posts. Some of my own get too verbose, of course. What I'm really talking about in length is not the number of words but the internal structure: an introductory gambit that introduces the ideas to be discussed, a main body where several ideas are
discussed, and then some conclusions (for longer ones, many iterations between ideas and conclusions). A few twists in between. If you're aiming at a "news blog" I think this one does the trick reasonably well. But I think that as a "trend analysis" blog this doesn't quite meet up to the mark. You seem largely keen to state some words, drop some names, point to some sources, make some grand statements and quit with a "wait-n-watch".

* I think you should completely avoid hyperlinks in your conclusion, and you should specially avoid conclusions like "I don't know ..." specially if you blog post started out with "We shall determine whether ..."

* Avoid saying things like "anyone who has..." or "it is obvious that..." I know I do that sometimes too but that's my bad habit :)

* A question: what kind of comments do you really seek? Do you hope that people will follow all the links, read all the articles/go through the websites, and get back with comments? For the kind of posts that you have written, the comments you get will largely be meaningless because the general class of people who try to comment
sensibly will first try to follow all the links so they'll be exhausted by the time they return.

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Google Co-op

Earlier I had posted about custom search and what the different options are. Here I intend to go a little deeper into one such custom search option: Google Co-op. So what is Google Co-op?

Google Co-op is a platform that enables you to customize the web search experience for users of both Google and your own website.

Where does Google Co-op fit in? To start off, it is a great replacement for site search, this article talks about how it can be used as a site search and how it is better than other options. Of course that's only one of the ways to use this new and powerful offering by Google, and is almost like using your jet ( should you own one ) to go down to the grocery store.


What then can be done with Google Coop?

Jose Luis Reyes Tollini has written a nice introductory article that covers most of what can be done with Google Co-op. Eric Enge's article describes how to go about creating a custom search engine.


And of course the various search sites created so far demonstrate the possibilities better than I can describe here. Before I shamelessly list out these search sites, I should highlight the one created by Vik Singh. It highlights some interesting concepts which, I believe could lead to some very interesting possibilities.



Here goes the list:

Directories of custom search engines:

CSE Links
Coop Directory

And some Good CSEs:

LisZen - Library and information Science Search Engine
SearchForBooks - Like the name says: Search for books
GooTube - Find videos
GrabAJob - Job finder
FindingFunnies - Joke finder



On a not so related note Google's response to community driven search along with Jimmy Wales' ideas are worth reading.

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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.

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Vista:Google::IE:Netscape?

Let me elaborate: I was going through some of the features of Windows Vista and to me it appeared as if with Vista Microsoft may do to Google, what they did to Netscape with integrating IE into Windows.


To recap the browser wars, were this struggle between Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator for browser dominance. The end result was:

"Microsoft Windows had over 90% share of the operating system market. IE was bundled with every copy of Windows; therefore, even though early versions of IE were markedly inferior to Netscape's browser, Microsoft was still able to rapidly increase its market share. And IE remained free while the enormous revenues from Windows were used to fund its development and marketing, resulting in rapid improvements until it was so similar to Netscape feature-wise that users had no desire to download and install Netscape."

and of course the result was predictable:

Things have not changed significantly in that regard. According to these guys Windows XP seems to enjoy a 85% market share and this market forecast claims that Windows Vista will have a 40% market share by the end of 2008. On the other hand these statistics show that MSN seems to be doing really badly in the search market. Now anyone who has read/watched/listened to Gate's Keynote will understand why it is essential for Microsoft to dominate the search market in the coming years.

Will Microsoft use the same strategy they used before?

I don't know but a look at the Vista's search features here and here might give some insights...

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User Generated Content

All of a sudden the little spoken of you turns out to be the person of the year!! So here I am trying to figure out what this might mean. I know they are talking about the fact that there are a lot of people out there generating content, but my question is: Is this content for real? I mean is this really "Great" Content.

Let me try put that question in context - Lets say Joe is a new to blogging. Joe's Blogging story might go something like this:

Day 1 - Joe is excited. He always wanted to have a web page of his own but when he had tried to set it up he found he had to know about things like html, web pages, layouts and the likes. All of a sudden Joe figures he can get out there and pay more attention to what he wants to say instead of how to get it out there.

Day 2,3,4,5 - Joe decides to start a blog the very next day.

Day 6 - Joe gets onto a popular blogging site and starts a blog. He chooses a template that's just perfect for him, goes on to place things just where he wants them and then writes and publishes his first blog.

Day 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 ... - He checks his blog to see how neat it looks

Day 7, 8, 9 - He keeps posting to his blog.

Day 10 - He discovers that he has so far not got any comments from anyone. He updates his blog, but wonders why.

Day 11 - Now Joe is irritated. He is actually taking time off to post his ideas out there and no one is reading!!! Joe now ties to add pictures to his blog.

Day 12 - Joe decides to find ways to get people to his blog and so searches here and reads this, this and this. He discovers that the only real way to get more people to your blog is by "participating" in related blogs. So Joe goes to a blog search, searches for related blogs and posts about 25 comments across various related blogs.

Day 13 - Joe finds a comment on his blog!! He repeats his commenting strategy.


My point?
Joe now becomes one of the millions of active bloggers across the Internet - That's a good thing.
But Joe's driving force is not "sharing of knowledge" or any such noble purpose, but simply to get people to his Blog - Is that a good thing?


This phenomenon is not something that is only blog related, interestingly the same kind of thing seems to happen on Digg. In fact this seems to be so common on Digg that it has its own name: Digg Circle. In fact the question of all this being allowed became such a big issue that Kevin Rose the founder of Digg had to step in resulting in the resignation of one of Diggs ( at that time ) top users.


I am not saying that participation for reasons other than "wanting to share knowledge" is bad. I just think that the resultant materiel might suffer...

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