Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Public curation mechanisms for quality; The Mozilla / open directory project tried this. Curation doesn't scale and often assumes a single unifying ontology. This is particularly problematic in a cross-cultural context. Besides, 'quality' is not a unidimensional metric in a result set: consider timeliness, authority, notability, uniqueness, comprehensibility, etc. 2) Transparency, telling users exactly how the inf…
> Curation doesn't scale and often assumes a single unifying ontology Wikipedia is a pretty big exception to that assertion. Perhaps DMOZ (a clone of Yahoo circa 1996) is not the only way to do curation. Perhaps Wikipedia could apply what has worked for Wikipedia, i.e. develop a set of POV-neutral criteria for organizing collections of links and then invite everyone to participate. It's really easy to be negative. Bu…
The article is written once then modified or evolved occasionally by (almost exclusively) humans, but very frequently read. It is intended to be intelligible, being structured and based in natural language. It has a very well defined scope within a flat namespace, and often clear relations to multiple formal ontologies. It is structured to be consumed in part or in whole, and may contain rich media and strong supporting contextual information (related pages).
By contrast a search result summarizes a set of potential information sources that may answer a search query in whole or in part, to various definitions of "answer". It is generally written once, by a computer, and thrown away after some period of caching. It is intended to be concise. Each component result has relatively poor context, relying upon the searcher to interpret timeliness, authority, notability, uniqueness, comprehensibility, etc. with the limited information presented, typically a very short content excerpt. It is structured to be scanned, classically in a ranked fashion from "best hit" to "worst hit", and is generally a wall of text.
Wikipedia successfully attracts people to contribute to the former, but the latter - where the information product is generated on the fly and lasting impact is amorphous (nothing particularly concrete for contributors to point to and say "I did that! Warm and fuzzies!") - is a very different beast.
I too believe there is room for innovation ... there are potentially low hanging fruit like inter-linguistic semantic queries (not keyword search) ... but there are no such key problem areas identified in the paper's summary.