Google Looking For Community Driven Search?

Wikipedia is currently the greatest online encyclopedia and has beaten Britannica. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales will be launching Wikia search for posing a stiff competition to Google and Yahoo!. Peter Norvig of Google gives an interview about the new venture of  Jimmy Wales. Talking on the advantages and disadvantages of a  community-driven search, Norvig said “Judgments from users are certainly important for search.  In a way, hyperlinks (the basis of the Google PageRank metric) are user judgements, but the users are limited to webmasters.  The more the merrier, so it is good to get feedback from others as well. Google and other search engines do use user feedback, mostly implicit feedback in the form of clicks, with some explicit feedback.  We experimented with smiley/frowny faces in the toolbar, and with various types of feedback on search results.  Currently we have a " Dissatisfied? Help us improve" link at the bottom of the page; at times we've asked for positive feedback as well.”

He also stressed on the point that users feedback is very important and Google will continue to use sources of user feedback that the company has been utilizing. Google Co-op Custom Search Engine is the biggest collection of search information contributed by users.

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