blog.wired.com — Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' open source, human-powered Google killer died a quiet death Tuesday, making Wikia.com the latest object lesson in the futility of trying to unseat Google as the king of search engines.
Apr 4, 2009 View in Crawl 4
qumahlinApr 4, 2009
ok, first off the headline is horribly misleading, it makes you think Google did something to drive them under other then just existing, which isn't the case.Next, how did they expect a "human-powered" search engine to ever truly scale and be useful in any meaningful manner? They were NEVER a competitor to Google, they were trying to create a niche market for people that wanted results and real input about them....guess what, most people just want results.The only thing this proved is that Wikia Search had a bad business plan from the onset and as others mentioned they didn't exactly advertise.
lighturpleApr 4, 2009
I'm confused. I read the article and I still don't see how Google killed this or any of the other search engines mentioned. The article says, "...it made sure to become powerful enough that no young upstarts would do to it what it did..."Was Google not supposed to grow as more users turned to it? I'm at a total loss for the point they're trying to make in this article.
coffeeroxApr 5, 2009
This account has been closed by the user
kamikazowApr 5, 2009
Um, you confuse "free of charge" with freedom (=libre). Google supports some FOSS projects through Sommer of Code and its Android involvement, but Google's core assets (search algorithm etc.) are not libre.
kamikazowApr 5, 2009
They use Yahoo?
tnoyApr 6, 2009
Not exactly what you want, but a lot better than using the history: <a class="user" href="http://www.neaveru.com/digg/index.html">http://www.neaveru.com/digg/index.html</a>
oxiliteApr 20, 2009
Eff-ing right. Had to log in just to digg your comment.