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The Human Powered Search Engine

Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google

“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Not such a novel idea, human-powered search. Anybody remember DMOZ? That project is (IMHO) a huge failure. But let’s see whether he can pull it off.

via Rough Type, although his title Web War 2007! is overly sensationalist.

Well, unless we believe in the old adage that business is war.