Link to Wikimedia's wiki page on the project includes a decent FAQ: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine
Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]
31–40 of 192 posts
Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]
#32Surprised no one has been mentioning qwant.com yet.
Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]
#33This is a very, very, very small amount of money if you want to build a search engine, let alone one "to rival Google" (source?). Looks like the goals are realistic, though - look how wikipedia search could be extended beyond results from wikipedia.org, build some test sets. And get a better idea what it really is that is supposed to be built.
I run a search engine that indexes an entire western country for beer-worth of vps. I spent few months to build it though. I don't see scaling for the world to be hard given the money they have.
Building a basic search engine is relatively easy. Building one that rivals Google is extremely difficult, and not just because they're so big and convincing people to switch is hard. It's much easier to have good results when you know that the websites you're indexing don't care about you at all. Once you get popular enough to rival Google everyone and their mother will be trying to game you and that changes the problem significantly.
The original implementation of the Google search engine would get obliterated today, though I guess you have to start somewhere.
Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]
#34Doesn't it say 250k in the letter?
Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]
#35The title is misleading. It's 250k, not 2.5m and the goal is a knowledge engine, not a search engine.
Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I make a request from another IP, it gives me the right page. " (...) Try... Who is Richard Stallman? define bravado 10 USD to EUR RFC 2460 generate username help - about"
This is so strange. If I fetch the page from http://archive.is I get the same default Nginx page http://archive.is/AxHFV the only thing I can think off right now is that the http "Host" header field is not sent. I have several sites on the same server and Nginx is used as a reverse proxy and uses the Host field to redirect traffic to different ports.
You should really consider using multiple server blocks instead of relying on the Host field.
Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]
#37The biggest problem is the lack of data about what people are searching. It's a catch-22 that's very hard to break in the face of Google's search dominance and ubiquity.
By Google being the best, it only becomes better, and introduces a huge barrier to entry to competitors. It used to be possible to know what people were searching for to end up in a given Wikipedia article, but the process is now only asynchronous (and limited) through Webmaster tools[1]
In my mind, the most interesting aspect of the announcement should not be how much money they have to spend, but how they plan on solving this paradox.
Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]
#38Summary of the approach (p10):
"1) Public curation mechanisms for quality;
2) Transparency, telling users exactly how the information originated;
3) Open data access to metadata, giving users the exact date source of the information;
4) Protected user privacy, with their searching protected by strict privacy controls;
5) No advertising, which assures the free flow of information and a complete separation from commercial interests;
6) Internalization, which emphasizes community building and the sharing of information instead of a top-down approach."
My first thought: How will transparency impact SEO? Will spammers be able to better game the algorithm when they know its internals?
However I am excited at the prospect of a wikipedia-like public curation system for the entire web. I admit I'm flabbergasted that the whole thing ever worked, but it does.
Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is so strange. If I fetch the page from http://archive.is I get the same default Nginx page http://archive.is/AxHFV the only thing I can think off right now is that the http "Host" header field is not sent. I have several sites on the same server and Nginx is used as a reverse proxy and uses the Host field to redirect traffic to different ports.
You should really consider using multiple server blocks instead of relying on the Host field.
I do. Nginx does the matching using the Host field http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#serv...
Re: Wikipedia starts work on $2.5M internet search engine project to rival Google [pdf]
#40I support it 100%. I love Google but they have too much power and I'm sure they'll start taking advantage of that soon (like they did with Google+ and Youtube).
Google has been the dominant search engine for a solid 12 years. They have a practical monopoly. They're under constant anti-trust scrutiny - of one form another - in all of their major markets. And you think they're going to start taking advantage (as in particularly egregious behavior) of their position soon?
No need. It's generating $23 billion per year in operating income and growing. There are no serious challengers. It's far more likely their search engine will be constrained under piles of government oversight in the coming years. About the time governments start worrying about products like this in tech, is about the time they're just beginning to become less central. The exact same thing happened to both IBM and Microsoft.