Should SEOs Care About Wikipedia?
523145
Wikipedia is not a search engine, and links from Wikipedia no longer count towards increasing your link equity Ã¢ÂÂ but there are still plenty of reasons to pay attention to Wikipedia.
698904
(InfoWorld) - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is targeting the fourth quarter of this year for the unveiling of an open-source search engine that he hopes could challenge the dominance of market-leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. The project is being run through Wikia Inc., a for-profit company founded by Wales that seeks to use a similar model to the Wikipedia community-written and edited encyclopedia. He hopes to provide the tools and technology to allow programmers across the Internet to collaborate on the development and testing of a search engine and make the results freely available. "The essential core principles are that I think search is now a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet and it's really fundamental to society as a whole and therefore as citizens of the world we should be concerned about it being a secretive black box," he said. Efforts to create open search engines aren't new but one of the stumbling blocks they face is a difficulty in running large-scale tests of the search algorithm, said Wales. The algorithm is the code that sits at the heart of the search engine and is responsible for its accuracy or lack thereof. "To create a full-scale crawling spider of the Web actually requires a great deal of investment in hardware," he said. Wikia is planning to provide resources to enable full-scale crawling of the World Wide Web so the software can be fully tested and tuned. The project is still in the planning stages and Wales expects that the first test version due this year will help programmers spot bugs that occur with real-world usage and speed up the development process. "Probably what we'll do is launch something in the fourth quarter of this year with a really big warning 'It sucks, we know it sucks, it's experimental, don't panic. This is just an experiment to show what could be and now we're going to start working to see how we could make it better'," he said. Already the project is attracting attention, not just from engineers who want to lend a hand but from companies that are already offering search engines. "We are getting a lot of interest from second-tier search players who are really interested in some of the alternatives that might be available. If you're not one of the top three or four you've got to really wonder how could you ever catch up with Google and their billions of dollars. This provides kind of a level playing field where lots of people can contribute," said Wales. Wales cites a story he heard about research done on search results. In the study users were presented with results from Google and Yahoo but with the brand names switched, so the Google name was above the Yahoo results and vice versa. In most cases users picked the Google-branded results as better, he said. "To me this shows a great vulnerability if Google is only competing on brand image," said Wales. "If good quality search results are becoming a commodity, if the problem of search is in some sense solved then if I can make that free it really changes the structure of competition on the Internet." "We'll give away all the technology, all the data. Release everything under a free license because in my view the idea has been very solidly proven wrong by Wikipedia that in order to out-compete on the Internet you need to have a walled garden of special content no one else has. Wikipedia gives everything away. You can download the database and put up a clone of Wikipedia tomorrow. All that means is that more people find out about the brand, more people drive traffic back," he said. Even if multiple competitors spring up using the Wikia search engine he's hopeful the Wikia site can still grab a 2 percent or 3 percent share of the search market and so would become "a pretty decent little business." But just how successful the search engine is will depend on more than just its accuracy. The search algorithm is the most closely guarded secret of companies like Google because it determines how high a particular site is ranked. If the algorithm is public then it would mean site owners could precisely tune their sites for high rankings and that's sure to attract the attention of spammers. Wales hopes a community effort will result in a black list of abusers to keep the results clean. "If published algorithms make it too easy for spammers to game the system then we've got a real problem and my whole idea won't work," he said.
638647
Domain Names Still Important Despite Search Engine Popularity  A common belief is that search engines like Google make specific web addresses, that is, Internet domain names, relatively unimportant. &#8220;That is not true,&#8221; asserts psychologist Susan D. Griffith, Ph.D. &#8220;As in other areas of branding, names are everything, and memorable names on ...
718959
The company behind Wikipedia plans to shake up the search market by offering a collaborate search platform allowing users to improve upon the system much like they do with the popular encyclopedia Web site.
170479
The Jimmy Wales-founded organization, which encompasses Wikipedia and a number of other wiki-based sites, is appealing to its reader for donations to help expand its language reach (among other things).
695379
Is Google Page Rank Still Important?  Since 1998 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed the Google search engine, it has relied (and continues to rely) on the Page Rankâ¢ Algorithm. Googleâs reasoning behind this is, the higher the number of inbould links âpointingâ to a website, the more valuable that ...
764215
Answers.com has completed the first stage of integrating content into WikiAnswers, a Wiki Q&#038;A service. The content on WikiAnswers is an ongoing collaboration of shared knowledge, using the &#8220;wiki&#8221; methodology best known for its use on Wikipedia (where a great deal of Answers.com content originates from). Answers.com says that the quality of the Q&#038;A WikiAnswers is [...]
530432
You need a strategy to educate the decision-makers who will never actually do SEO, but who cut the check or approve the time spent for SEO. They need to know what to expect, and what's expected of them.
327215
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has set Jan. 7 as the launch date for an open-source search project that eventually hopes to challenge Google and other established players.The Wikia Search project has assembled the basic technologies for a search engine, including a search application, search algorithm and Web crawler. The project will allow technology enthusiasts to help filter sites and rank search results, using a community model akin to that of Wikipedia.The idea is to challenge the established players by offering a search service that is more transparent to end users, meaning they can see how search results are arrived at. Wales has described Yahoo and Google as opaque services that don&#39;t explain how results are arrived at.Wales has started to invite a handful of people to test an early version of the search platform, which will be publicly launched on Jan. 7, he wrote in an email to the Wikia mailing list Monday.The search tool will take time to evolve, and the initial service won&#39;t match the capabilities of the leading search engines. Contributors will have to develop the search platform over time, in a similar way that Wikipedia took time to get enough entries to be useful.The search project is part of Wales&#39; for-profit company, Wikia Inc., which offers a software platform that anyone can use to build wikis. In a similar way,&#160;the Wikia Project will allow other people to build their own search engines.Wikia Inc. was started in 2004 and has received investment money from Amazon.com and Bessemer Venture Partners.&#160;
255294
For many, it's tempting to think that video search engines may not represent a great opportunity for SEO, but there is plenty of evidence that show this is not the case.
83261
The core business of Internet search engines is being threatened by the evolution of new generation of content providers. The search engines like Google or Yahoo make money by indexing the web sites all over
303962
A Wikipedia company will build an Internet search engine that lets users improve on the system, the Internet encyclopedia founder said in Tokyo Thursday.  The Wikia Inc.
234264
Teaching search engines to see Web pages the way people do could improve their performance.
736167
Blogs and wikis are wonderful tools, but they can devolve into the online equivalent of grunting apes.
86299
Plus: Is Microsoft search engine crawling Google? [News.com Extra]
618610
Could this be an end to broken links? New software replaces and updates links on Web pages.
18365
The founder of Wikipedia says taking the online encyclopedia's collaborative approach into the field of search won't dethrone Google Inc. or another major search engine Â at least not soon.