Search Wiki: Challenging Google!!!

In present day, challenging Google in search technology do require real guts. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia is already working on it. He is on his way of making a vast search engine on the lines of his creation Wikipedia (see here for Wikipedia in Wikipedia), which has already established itself as a very commonly used and referred encyclopedia. In founder's own words Search Wikia is "the search engine that changes everything.... Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search."

I recently came across a cover story on Search Wiki in the March 2007 issue of Fast Company. Click here to see the complete article. The whole idea behind this new search engine is really interesting and a very challenging indeed. Human contributed search results would certainly result in more meaningful results, but how fast? Is it really possible to compete with the machine generated results? The statistics in this article to show the level of satisfaction with current search engines is also interesting:

"In a blind study by the French linguistics scholar Jean Véronis and his students, Google and Yahoo tied for user satisfaction with their results, both scoring an embarrassing 2.3 out of a possible 5. About 28% of the time, users thought that all the search results they received from both engines were "totally useless." They gave fairly low marks of 2.8 and 2.9 even to the very first links listed by Yahoo and Google, respectively. About a quarter of the time, they didn't find what they considered to be even one good result from either search engine."

I am not sure about the details of this study like what was the sample of people to collect the responses, the demographics, geographical location etc., but finding the relevant and desired results from any search first time is really rare for me. In fact, I have earlier compared various search engines like Yahoo, Google, Clusty etc and it seems that there is still lot of scope for improvement in search algorithms.

Good Luck to Search Wikia for their endeavor. There are people willing to contribute and work for this project and I hope this competition will make life easier for search users like me.