Used to be, back in the 90's, that every other week a new search engine was announced. Many of them were aggregating other search results then parsing them out, so you shouldn't count those. Especially since they were often created by university students who were querying other university student web search sites.
Then they got a little more serious and you would choose from the Altavistas and the Excites. The University of Washington had a nice little web search project from one of its grad students, Brian Pinkerton, by the name of Webcrawler. It ended up getting bought by AOL.
Then Yahoo struck and made its mark. Then Google struck and made its mark. MSN is out there as well. All continue to try and improve their technology. Yahoo recently debuted some predictive hint features in its drop down box with topic suggestions, and Google just announced its intent to search for text within images.
You would think that we might have settled into a three or so search market, so it is a bit of a surprise to see a new engine enter the market.
Search Wikia, a search engine from Wikia.com and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, made its official debut today. It is an an open-source, community-driven effort and hopes that this will be enough of a distinction to become a player. This was also a note in one of The New Scientist "Technology" blog's bold predictions for 2008 which has since been met with some push back.
I do like the mini-article they supply with search results.
2 comments:
Not to be "that guy", but I think the title should technically be "Search Wikia Makes Its Debut"...
Wikia (minus the "Search" part) is a wiki farm also started by Jimmy Wales that's been around for a few years now.
Nitpick over...
Where would the world be with out "that guy". A place full of both slight and major inaccuracies that would compound until we sank under the weight of our self driven confusion. Nitpick noted and changed. Thank you.
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