Could Wikipedia Itself Be a Google Killer?
Tim Bray explains his crisis of conscience as he finds himself increasingly linking to the Wikipedia page for certain topics instead of linking to their actual homepage. My immediate reaction was “why link at all?” At Peer Pressure our policy is to avoid linking to topics that people can easily find themselves on Google (links that I’ve dubbed “identity links”). Tim’s example, Canada Line, certainly qualifies. Entering it into Google yields their homepage and the corresponding Wikipedia article as the first two hits. Identity links provide a certain amount of convenience, but it’s so darn arbitrary which terms we choose to turn into links and (as Tim laments) what we link them to. This is why I argued at the time that these links should be generated automatically by the web browser. I certainly find this more appealing than the link bundles that Tim proposes, since these put too much burden on the page author (even finding one link is enough work for me) and are therefore unlikely to gain traction.
Whether or not you agree with this, Tim implicitly makes a much more profound point. There are certain aspects of internet and web architecture that seem to oscillate endlessly between two extremes rather than finding equilibrium at some point along the continuum. Network architectures, for example, started out as client/server (mainframes and terminals) in the 1970’s, morphed into peer-to-peer (PCs and LANs) in the 1980’s, returned to client/server in the 1990’s (the web), with P2P regaining ground in the naughty aughties.
Another good example is finding stuff on the web. The pioneer was Yahoo with their handcrafted hierarchical directory. Google then stole the mantle with the opposite approach: a fully automated full-text engine powered only by statistics. The implication of Tim’s piece is that, with Wikipedia, we are once again seeing value in the human-driven approach to search. The difference is that, this time, uncounted thousands of volunteers have taken the place of a small group of paid professionals, with results that are vastly superior to what Yahoo achieved a decade ago.
It never really occurred to me to see Wikipedia as a search engine and rival to Google, but it fact it makes a lot of sense. I certainly use it this way with increasing frequency. If I know from experience that a specific type of search will perform poorly on Google, I go directly to Wikipedia and search there. Not only can I find links to whatever I’m looking for, in many cases I can find the answer to my question directly on the site. And all this without the spam and crud of the wild wild web. Jimmy Wales recently announced that he’s working on a wiki-based search engine that has been hyped as a “Google killer”. If, as I gather, this project is still in the planning stages, my advice would be to put it to bed and concentrate instead on the ability of Wikipedia itself to compete in this space.
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I must agree, WikiPedia makes sense. However, I disagree with the approach oscillation. Today, I can distinguish the cases Google’s searching is best fit for as well as those cases looking’em up in the Wiki is best much. See, I use Wikipedia to look up a certain fact. Quite often I’m pleased to find a complex explanation, new fact related to what I’m looking for.
Comment by funTomas — 1/22/2007 @ 10:00 pm
The last two years or so I’ve been frequently forgetting to search Google, even if I could not find what I was looking for on Wikipedia. Firefox played a big part in this: just typing “wp “; it’s never been so easy. However, I also use Google a lot, but that’s because I’m too lazy to type in the TLD (e.g. I type “last” instead of “last.fm”).
Btw, there is already something like Wikiasari from Jimbo Wales: Wikiseek.
http://www.wikiseek.com/
Comment by Lulu — 1/23/2007 @ 1:59 pm
im really not that web savvy, but you got to hand it to wikipedia coming up with such an innovative concept that beats google, and the rest. that’s what happens when you put in people first, instead of profits
Comment by lee perez — 1/26/2007 @ 4:44 pm