Sunday, March 11, 2007

Banking on the Wisdom of Crowds For Search? Yikes

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wants to create an open, editable search engine. In other words, spammers and advertisers can more easily mess with the results? As much as I love the idea of "crowd wisdom," I don't have a lot of faith in people behaving themselves. People game Digg.com all the time despite their best efforts to prevent it. Imagine the possibilities with a full Web search engine. The constant battling with people out for their own best interests will likely render the results useless.

However Jimmy Wales is no fool and I have to assume they've got a plan to combat this. Project home here and more here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thats doesn't necessairly have to be the case, have you heard of the invisible hand? its a powerful concept and one we make use of on our Tall Street Social Search engine