Forum:URLs, Tags, Folders, and Identifying domains...

Hello Wiki Workers,

I just read an article in Time about your (JIm & Wiki's) goals to fix search.

Thanks. It is broken, badly broken. I do not like using Google or any other search engine because they are serving the interests of the advertisers (television's fatal mistake) rather than serving the interests of their users and allowing the advertiser limited access to respectfully address us.

What I read you are doing sounds very much like the beginning days of Yahoo and similar creatures. As long as you allow those with money as their motive the opporunity to influence search results your search engine will be corrupted as well.

Therefore at the bare minimum you must divide your search engine in two domains: one that returns commercial results and one that returns non-commercial results. This rule must be set in stone.

I feel you can refine it a bit more into 7 master domains and then further subdividing these domains as appropriate:

Education, Engineering, Entertainment, eCommerce, ePolitics, eReligion, eCulture

I call these the Seven Deadly Sins of the Virtual Earth.

In general, most everybody who has a search query has a general ideal the type of person or institution most likely to supply the searcher with a trustworthy and reliable answer (hence Wikipedia's popularity). Nobody really trusts or are interested 99.99% of the results returned by Google. This doesn't bode well for Google's future as an effective advertising medium except for certain questionable businesses.

Clearly delineating between commercial and non-commercial interests removes that problem from the equation. Along a similar line of reasoning I further divided out top level master search domains. You'll notice, every master domain that I had to preface with an (e) is also typically a unwelcome topic that loud people and loud institutions obsessively try to inject at the top of search rankings. These screamers, no matter their affiliations, shoud be safely locked away unless one opens the the door and seeks them out.

One thing that is clear is the Entertainment is a category open to lawyerly abuse, as eventually they all are if strict definitions are not in place and spelled out so that those categorizing and those searching know what to unambinguously expect. That has to be the heart of any search: why search if you are not going to find what you are looking for?

I think the same sort of thing needs to be applied to Wiki Cities as finding and identifying communities is already becoming problematic and almost in need of a search algorithm itself. Most people don't like things looking chaotic and disorganized, it gives one the impression of sloth.

Regards UrLogOrdnung 00:36, 6 August 2007 (UTC)