Democratizing Search Engines: Good or Bad?
Thought this was an interesting video of Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder), discussing the benefits of perhaps a more democratic search engine ranking system vs. the “black box” algorithm method used by Google.
In theory it sounds great to me. However, I question if there would be a broad enough representation of search users who actually take the time to vote and rank results? And if they do, will they end up ranking sites for good reason or will there be too much “static” in the voting process? That leads me to believe some sort of hybrid methodology might be more ideal.
I don’t know, what are your thoughts? Could a more democratic Wikia Search type system be the wave of the future?
Tagged with: democratizing search engines • google • jimmy wales • searchengines • wikia search • wikipedia
Interesting post Thad, but like you say how much static will interfere with the results…our ANC Site and Blog were already appearing under their names.
I’ve just added the ANC site under the broad keyword phrase ‘affiliate marketing’. As I type this, it’s now at #1. Now that’s the kind of democracy I like!