Can Social Search Take Down Google? - Yahoo! News

“I think he doesn’t really understand the scale of what Google has to handle in terms of the queries from around the world and the amount of traffic that flows to it and the attempts that are made to try to manipulate it,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of the Web site Search Engine Land.

With all due respect to Mr. Sullivan, isn’t this the point of what Mr. Wales is trying to do?  That is, isn’t this an attempt to make search more discernible and meaningful to more people?  To bring it out of Google’s ultra-secret, do no evil, hands and into the public.

Large scale search has been tied up in the hands of very few people for a good long time.  Projects like Nutch and Lucene can provide the means to do large scale search, but have a hard time demonstrating it in public because it requires a lot of computing horsepower (unless, of course, you take the time to figure out what sites are using them, at which point you realize how big it can go).  Perhaps Mr. Wales’ attempt will resolve that, maybe it won’t.  However, until there is a viable, open search engine, we will all be left wondering who paid for which position in the search results.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Computers, Google, Jimmy Wales, Lucene, Nutch, Search Engines, Wikia, social search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.