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"


**We Require a Link Back Please. Finish Reading!

Wikia Search. Look Out Google, Wiki has Community Search on the Horizon.

It's no secret I am a BIG Wiki fan, and not such a big Google fan. So you can imagine I am pretty happy to see Wiki's Jimmy Wales and co-founder Angela Beesley, taking a original stab at Google's search market share. To this end he has started Wikia a for profit search engine company!

Wikia has outlined these 4 Organizing Principals for themselves:

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. "Pursuing the Holy Grail of Privacy Protection"

If they can just meet these principals alone they will be leaps above the top 10! You can join in the development discussion too!

Recently, Wikia acquired Grub, a distributed crawler developed by Looksmart. Grub is run on volunteer citizen's PCs all over the world as a background process. This keeps Wikia from have to initiate their own network, at least for the moment. The only real information I have about this crawler is that now I will have to unblock it from my sites, I have it blocked as in the past it has been a rude robot.

The new Wikia search service will combine computer-driven algorithms and human-assisted editing when the company launches a public version of the search site toward the end of 2007, Wales said in a phone interview.

Wikia is going to be a combination search, humans will interact with the queried terms to affect seeming unaffectable issues....such as "hit" like with your hand and a music CD cut. Right now Wikia has about 35 full time employees who are in the process of developing Wikia's own relevancy ranking system for results. The results are generated with Lucerne, another open source program for indexing.

Visually, Search Wikia will have the standard search-engine interface. "The differences will be that at various points all along that search process, there'll be opportunities for people to engage with the community and join and participate in the construction of the search results," Wales said.

There is not much other information as far as indexing, sitemap protocol, tools and submission process....but its early. I think this is exactly what the Internet needs! I suspect it won't be long after launch that they will have to assemble their own network to crawl and index in addition to the volunteer network. There is qualified historical reasoning that this could be VERY big.

If you have anything to add, please comment. I was unable to find much on Lucerne programming. Like to hear from someone unning Grub on their PC also.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"


**We Require a Link Back Please. Finish Reading!