Search engines vs. Wikipedia
This thought came up after a discussion with my colleague Srinivas Padmanabhuni. Information sources such as Wikipedia could pose a real threat to search engines such as Google. In most searches, Wikipedia anyway comes in the first 5 hits or at the most the first search result page. So why should users go through a search engine which is anyway directing them to Wikipedia.
Moreover Wikipedia is based on Folksonomy (user generated content and tags) which in some ways ensures some bit of credibility. It is in some ways a throwback on the initial search model of Yahoo wherein they employed a dedicated bunch of people to create taxonomies to enable quick searches. But those were the times when the Internet content was limited. Now since we have the massive user base which is able to collaboratively create taxonomies, this parallel model gains in importance.
The alternative school of thought is of collaborative existence wherein the search engines would leverage the user generated tags in Wikipedia.
Comments
I don't quite agree with you Dr. Ganesh.
Search engines list out several sources of information as web results based on the topic that you searched for. Wikipedia is one such source. In most cases in refer to several such sources before I get enough information.
I blogged about the effectiveness of wikipedia several days back. Here is the link :
http://www.talash.net/blog/wikiality/37/
Posted by: Mukul Gupta | December 8, 2006 08:31 AM
I think Wikipedia and similar services to pose a threat to the established search engines. I would rather go to a site which provides me information aggregated and sumarized than clicking on links and trying to get the information pieces together. I think in cases of "information search" where one is looking at specific information "Tell me about Infosys" , What is Web 2.0 anyway etc, it is better to go to Wikipedia like sites. These are cases where i know what I am looking for and there are categories/tags I can search for. But for product searches and for generic searches (I have an error in Windows XP , what should I do), a search engine is better.
Posted by: Gururaj | January 3, 2007 08:31 PM
Wikipedia cant beat Google as Google has a better business model. Wikipedia does not promote or appreciate commercialization and world runs on commercial tiers. Google is a commercial platform to bring the customers to the right companies. Google really works, Wikipedia does have a supporting role.
>> the user generated tags
Look at google coop, Google heads are really smart, an incentive model and expert tags, which works better than User generated tags. Search for ear infection and you will get some relevant tags.
Posted by: AjiNIMC | February 6, 2007 05:41 PM