Word: wikipedia
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...computer hacker named Virgil Griffith unleashed a clever little program onto the Internet that he dubbed WikiScanner. It's a simple application that trolls through the records of Wikipedia, the publicly editable Web-based encyclopedia, and checks on who is making changes to which entries. Sometimes it's people who shouldn't be. For example, WikiScanner turned up evidence that somebody from Wal-Mart had punched up Wal-Mart's Wikipedia entry. Bad retail giant...
...Before you answer that question, consider that "Jimbo" is Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the most visited reference site on the Internet and the second most visited domain after a Google search. The success of Wikipedia should give us pause before dismissing latest challenge to seemingly unbeatable Google...
...last two years, visits to Wikipedia have grown over 600%. Hitwise tracks 3,098 educational reference sites, and Wikipedia accounted for over 30% of visits to all sites in the category. Even more intriguing is the interdependence between Wikipedia and Google. Wikipedia is the second most visited site from Google searches (MySpace.com is number one), due mostly to the sheer volume and prominent placement of Wikipedia listings in Google search-engine results. Google is responsible for 46% of Wikipedia's traffic. How could Jimbo possibly best Google, which was, according to Hitwise, responsible for 64.4% of all Internet searches...
...algorithms to determine what results are presented to users. As he explains on his company's site, Wikia.com, search "is part of the fundamental structure of the Internet and, it is currently broken." For-profit Wikia was started in 2004 as the commercial version of not-for-profit Wikipedia, but has now shifted its focus to search. Community involvement through volunteer editors, the backbone of Wikipedia, is clearly in Wales' plans. He revealed a second part of his strategy through his acquisition from Looksmart of the curiously named Grub, an open source distributed search crawler index...
...Wales can grow his volunteer base of previously idle computers as he has grown the editorial manpower of Wikipedia, perhaps a feasible search index is within grasp. Indexing the Internet, however, is the least of Jimbo's problems. Search engines rely on their algorithms, or complex formulas, to determine what listings to return for a searcher's query. Wales' answer to a better search experience is to combine a computer algorithm with editors who monitor what results should be returned for any given search. But can a viable search engine rely on the altruistic motives of its volunteer keepers...