Jimmy Wales for President

Good Morning, I have blogged this project before...But today some juicy new updates and information. Seriously, I love Jimmy Wales....He is such a common sense guy. For those of you who may not know, Wales is the mastermind behind Wikipedia. Really quickly, lets recap some of the highlights of the upcoming Wikia search project. They have 4 operating principals to which they are forming the entire project around...

Organizing Principles (TCQP) - the future of Internet Search must be based on:
1. Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
2. Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
3. Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
4. Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

These may seem like tall orders, but the implementation has already begun in the selection of open source software to define a truly community driven search. The crawler / indexer "Grub" will be run from volunteer's PCs all over the world. The index will be totally "Wiki" style and community edited. Searching is completed through another open source program called "Lucene" which is an Apache Foundation release. (Before when I blogged this I was unable to locate any information on the indexing software reported as"Lucerne", I believe that software to be Apache's "Lucene". Perhaps, one source made a typo that was replicated..Or they have renamed the software. However, the programs specs match what I have managed to find on the software. ) Lucene is Java based open source indexing and search technology, capable of full text, vertical, and advanced searching.

Looking over the program information I am lead to to believe the hand edited algorithm will be quite suited for the current Internet usage and trends. They look to be blending in the ability to rank and classify pages based on reputation and "Popularity-aware" ranking. There will of course be editors to assure accuracy and relevancy among the indexed pages. Ranking will be a combination of the programed algorithm and hand editing.

Now, Grub is really cool. As I mentioned before the crawler is run by volunteers from home PCs. Now, they are reporting a means with which to run it server side to crawl your own sites, with priority I might add! It is noted to respect your robots.txt, but not the robots Meta tag. The user agent is "grub-client", but remember the IP can conceivably be different every time. You would block Grub from directories in your robots.txt the same as other user agents, by name...Then command. If you wish to control how often Grub visits, you have to sign up for local crawling. Local crawling boils down to a text file called "Grub.txt" in your top level directory with enables your sites to be crawled locally.

So whats new with the project? Wales has finally announced a launch date for December 2007. So as I have said in the past.......The time is now. There are few times when an opportunity arises of such magnitude, that is so easy to complete. I am not going to be filing this under "things I should have done sooner"....Are you?

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"


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