According to a story in today’s Times of London (thanks for the heads-up Jon), Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is working with Amazon to launch a Google competitor. Like Wikipedia, the new service — let’s call it the Pooh-esque “Woogle” — is to be driven by human editors rather than algorithms.
Among other things, this is a useful reminder, if needed, of the continuing rise of what my friends at O’Reilly call “artificial artificial intelligence,” human-centered computing whereby we carbon-based lifeforms do the work, and fame-hungry computers get all the credit.
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Amazon did not lose enough money on A9? Now, they are jumping on the social search bandwagon?
Chris Sherman at Search Engine Watch had a good critique of social search efforts a few months ago.
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3623153
Worth reading for details of the challenges ahead for those seeking to exploit “artificial artificial intelligence”.
In my opinion, the biggest problem is that social search by itself does nothing to help filter crap and spam. If anything, it makes the problem worse by giving users more ability to manipulate rankings to drive traffic to their own sites.
The Wikia Search project homepage explains: Amazon has nothing to do with this.
Help me spread the word?