Salon.com reports on Jimmy Wales’s latest project - a for profit Open Source Search Engine.
Noteable highlights include making the ranking system transparent, indexing data from a network rather than a bank of computers, and wondering whether anyone can actually take a successful run at Google.
***Addendum July 29.07
Quote from Salon.com article:
the open search engine will not only take contributions for its source code, but that community members will also be actively involved in the editorial process governing search engine results.
I should come out as a fan of Wikipedia, with the requisite reservations. So I’m wondering whether this kind of initiative would evolve into a ‘community’ of users with a dynamic and evolving approach to editorial control over ranking, or a small band of elites with the power to bury results, skating uncomfortably close to censorship.
-PC-