Try a search for “wordpress blog” on Google and you get an advertisement of Google that says “Tip: Want to share your life online with a blog? Try Blogger”. As you probably know, Blogger is a product of Google. Advertisements to other products of Google are displayed when searching for “photo sharing”, for “calendar”, etc. So where is the problem you might ask? According to Blake Ross, of Firefox fame, “this is a bad sign for Google … Google lost me today”. The title of the post is interesting as well: “Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose“.
And very timely there is the announcement of Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, that plans to launch a new search engine in the first three months of 2007 (read the article on BusinessWeek).
“Like Wikipedia, the new search engine will rely on the support of a volunteer community of users. The idea is that Web surfers and programmers will be able to bring their collective intelligence to bear, to fine-tune search results and make the experience more effective for everyone.”
Users will be allowed to rerank search results by clicking on an “edit” link and programmers will be allowed to read and improve the code since it will be free software, based on Apache’s open-source Web search software Lucene and Nutch.
Wikiasari is the name of the project and I think we will speak a lot about it in the next future (few years ago I would have said we will hear a lot about it in the next future, the change of perspective is amazing). And everything goes back to trust as usual: who would you like to help with your knowledge? A trust-me-on-openess project like Wikiasari and Wikipedia or a trust-me-on-faith project like Google or Britannica? I personally have no doubt at all.
Google losing trust, Wikipedia still gaining trust
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