net search systems "broken"

Seeing Jonny Baker's reference to TallSkinnyKiwi writing on Blogging tips for 2007, reminded me that I'd seen something interesting about search engine optimization in a recent BBC web news story.

In his blog Andrew (TallSkinnyKiwi) Jones says

God bless them all and deliver us from the monolithic power
that Google is coming to exert in this new Cyber-Babylon of ours

Maybe Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikimedia) has already stepped up to the line to provide that deliverance.

According to the BBC story, Jimmy Wales says existing search systems for the net are "broken" ~ broken because they lack freedom, community, accountability and transparency ...

At the moment the results returned to those using keywords on sites such as Google are generated by computers which analyse webpages to work out what they are about and how useful they are.

Webpage owners use all kinds of tricks to outsmart the computer indexing systems and ensure their pages appear high up in results - even if they are not relevant to particular keywords.

By contrast the relevance of results returned by the Search Wikia will be decided by the site's community of users. Those searching will also be able to edit the list of results they get.

In Jimmy's Search Wikia project, results generated will be decided and edited by humans.