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Jimbo Wales and People Powered Search: A Long Shot
March 15, 2007 |
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Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is placing a fairly large bet
that people can trump technology in the search engine game. According to
a
recent report in Yahoo, He’s putting $4 million (of other people’s
money) plus an undisclosed “large amount” from Amazon on the line,
betting that he can steal 5% of the total search market away from Google
with his new project, Wikia.
The Problem with People
Wales has called both Google and Yahoo the “black boxes” of the
internet, criticizing them for the secrecy maintained around their
ranking algorithms, but details on exactly how Wikia will work have been
equally scarce. All we’ve heard so far is that an online community with
“a distinct and clear purpose -- a moral purpose -- that unites people
and brings them together to do something useful” will work to make web
search a better experience for us all. The “how” of how Wikia will work
has been lacking to this point. But it’s likely to follow a similar path
to Wikipedia. The online community will act as an army of human editors,
ensuring the quality of the results by collectively agreeing on them in
some fashion. The theory here is that there is no better filter for
results aimed at humans than those same humans.
Human “Signal Noise”
But the minute you put people into the equation, you introduce “signal
noise”. In engineering parlance, you add friction between the end user
and the desired content. Automated algorithms are relatively friction
free. Results are ranked with mathematical objectivity, based on
universally applicable principles. Queries flow through this channel to
connect with the content as determined by the algorithms.
People are smarter and more intuitive than the smartest algorithm, but
they’re also political. And the reality is, the very segment that Wikia
(and Wikipedia) depends most on are those most prone to politics.
Anytime you depend on people to do things out of the “goodness of their
hearts” you attract a certain kind of person. They’re community minded,
true, but it’s very much their definition of community. They can also be
elitist, obstinate, territorial and dismissive of those “outside the
circle”. These people tend to show up in the same places, condo strata
councils, non profit organizations, PTA’s, Church groups, and, online,
in forums and on wikis. They have the time to contribute, probably
because no one can stand them, so they don’t have an active social life
outside their chosen cause. I’m not saying everyone that contributes
falls into this category, but come on, admit it, everyone reading this
now has someone firmly in mind that fits the above description. They get
possessive about their online community, which is both a good and a bad
thing. With possessiveness comes politics, and signal noise.
Good Intentions, Bad Results
If you need more evidence, look at what is currently happening in the
best known communities that depend on online “Good Samaritans”. On Digg,
the Bury Brigade has been publicly acknowledged by Digg founder Kevin
Rose. Any story that doesn’t meet their criteria for what is interesting
gets quickly buried, never to rise to the surface again. That’s
censorship, and it’s just some of the signal noise you can expect when
you introduce people.
Wikipedia has come under frequent criticism for the same issue, a
handful of community elite (with a decidedly left wing bent) dictating
what should and shouldn’t be included as entries.
A Growth Bottleneck
But perhaps the biggest challenge for Wikia is scalability. If you put
your faith in people as your competitive advantage, you have to be
prepared to accept the restrictions that come with that. If Wales is
counting on people to help compile the index and rank it, that
introduces a potentially significant bottleneck.
Search engines are different than encyclopedias. Encyclopedias are much
less dynamic, even when you have an encyclopedia as fluid and
ever-growing as Wikipedia. Search engines have to be much more sensitive
to new content. A lower traffic entry on Wikipedia could probably go
untouched for months at a time and it wouldn’t significantly impact the
value of that entry. But users of a search engine expect even long tail
queries to bring back fresh and timely results. Given this, it would be
likely that Wikia would have to have a two stage approach to including
new content. They would need an automated spider and simple index, to be
later augmented and edited by humans. This would create a significant
divide in the quality of the results, between the edited and unedited
entries, especially in newer, less popular segments of the index. And,
as Wales himself admits, if the algorithms that power the automated
portion are open source, the door is wide open to spammers.
What’s In It For Me?
Finally, we have to look at the motivation on why people contribute to
Wikipedia, and ask ourselves if this would translate to a search engine.
When you contribute to Wikipedia, you’ve staked your claim in online
intellectual territory. You’ve left a mark, speaking to your expertise
in a particular area, on a place on the web where you can point and say,
“See, that’s me. I did that!” It may not have your name on it, but it’s
visible.
In a search engine, your contribution would be lost in a background
process that would leave virtually no trace that you ever tread there.
There are no bragging rights. And that’s essential to appeal to the
segment of the online community that Wikia needs to survive. If we’re
going to take even a few seconds out of our busy days to tag, vote,
nominate or whatever else Wales needs us to do, there better be
something in it for us, or it just won’t fly.
I applaud Jimmy Wales’s ideal of open access to technology and unlocking
the “black box” for the masses, but I just can’t see how it will work
for search. Much as I love humans, having been one on occasion, I’m not
sure they’re the competitive advantage a search engine needs. |
Gord Hotchkiss
President and CEO
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Positioning by Searchengineposition
Blog: www.outofmygord.com
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