January 21, 2008 · 11:38 AM

Humans Disrupting Algorithms

The marketing of search engines is a booming sector, and the online giant Google particularly thanks its growth to algorithms for page ranks. But some search engines (for example Maholo.com, Wikia.com) are going in new directions. The user is empowered. because he is able to influence the search results.

Speakers:

• Jason Calacanis has founded Mahalo.com, a search service based on user-determined categories and web links.
• Jimmy Wales has founded Wikipedia, the world's biggest online encyclopedia, further on, he recently founded the search service Wikia Search.
• David Kirkpatrick will moderate the panel. He is journalist at the Fortune Magazine, responsible for the division's internet and technology. He was awarded as the best technology journalist in the US.

A brass band plays some charming tunes, one in a weird nose flute way, another one imitating animals.

Jason Calacanis gives a brief presentation of Mahalo.com. "Normal search engines like ask.com give contents you don't necessarily need, content that's stolen and so on. In the first days of the internet, you could do indexes of internet content, but the longer the internet exists, the more content gets stolen.

Search enginges are having a harder and harder time to finde real content - humans would do a better job! Mahalo is not a search engine, but about content. Mahalo shows a top 7 of interesting sites. Providing content is only step one of mahalo.

Step two is a social network. People can recommend links to their fellow users. Right now 12,000 people have signed up, they send in 500 links per day - 10% are spam, 10-15% get accepted into the system. If a link gets recommended, it will be linked with the word and appears in the search engine - asking the users to add more links, like in Wikipedia, where users are asked to extend articles. By having the users in a social network on mahalo, you know whom to trust and whom not. If users abuse the system with spam etc., their friends on the network will also be downrated."

Jimmy Wales: "Open software has helped us develop the internet. Google is successful; there is no yearning for an alternative."

Jason: "60% of the users have problems with Google and want better results. But here, if you want to beat Google or Yahoo, you have to be not only 15% better, but two or three times better. The more common a word is, the worse is the result on Google, the better it is on Mahalo."

Jimmy: "It is possible to attract people away from Google. The search result quality from Google, Yahoo and ask.com are kind of similar, an industry-generated standard. Google is not as ahead as it used to be. They are not competing on technology, only on brand. Wikia is similar to Mahalo, but Mahalo at this point is more advanced. Wikia has also algorithmic search control, user feedback gets back into search control, people can cooperate to build new algorithms. In a traditional Wiki setting, you get to know people and have some trust to them."

Jimmy doesn't know the number of people working on Wikia right now. A lot of the basic algorithms of search are known now. It's only a matter of implementation.

Jason: Mahalo.com has a good relationship with Google, uses Google ads. I don't think it will work to attack Google on an algorithm base like Jimmy does.

Plus: Google does a lot more than algorithmic search. He gets the impression that Google uses humans to clean up the search results, watch toolbar data.

Voting is not a good idea. The ones who vote in big groups are spammers and slimebuckets. At Mahalo.com people fill out forms, that takes 30 seconds. It costs 50 cents or a dollar - to use editors to go through links - but it's worth it: the results are clean."

He likes the idea of paying people for their work. So writers can send their kids to school. (applause)

Jimmy: "Nobody works for free. The idea that people are working for free is nonsense. For free people have fun. The activities around Wikia is fun for people, stuff they do in their leasure time. If people don't want to do it, they should stop doing it."

David: "Wikia is getting terrible reviews, why should people use it if there's bad content?"

Jimmy: "Over 20,000 people signed up to use the system. It takes some time to start, it's not an easy start."

Jason: "This is an insane thing to try and do."

David: "Investors are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to get results."

Jason: "You are talking about algorithms, I am talking about art. Mahalo is a content company, I am not a programmer, I am a writer. Where Google and Yahoo stop, that's where we start."

Jimmy: "We have at least two more years of work before Wikia can compete with other search engines. Google has hundreds of people concerned with the search results, they are humans. Google makes editorial judgements."

Jason: "Page rank is based on human behaviour."

Question from the audience (Marissa Mayer, Google): "In the beginning indexes were used, but they just became to big. How come now humans are again making lists?"

Question from the audience: The problem is not the searching process, the problem is the results. You cannot do the fat front part with applying it to human beings. ...."

Jason: "There is money in the fat front part, you need that to do also the long tail."

Question from the audience: "If you look at the success of Wikipedia, people putting in their time to make the world a better place,. ... most sites where people put in content, they have a payoff, like at Facebook..."

Jimmy: "The vast majority of people who work at Wikia will say: It's for fun. We might fail though."

Jason: "We might fail too."

Jason: "In 2003 people had the same comments about weblogs. How can you make people write blogs if you don't pay them? But many started to blog, and some of them actually could quit their jobs and live off of their blogs."

Jimmy: Points out that there are over 4000 wikipedia communities, there are ads on the sites since you need for servers and energy. But nobody says people are working for free for Youtube, for example."

Jason: "Youtube actually has revenue share now. So people get paid actually."

Jimmy (final remark): "Absolutely no idea about advertising."

 

0 comments· Permalink· Trackback-URL

Tags: dld08·solon