Slashdot: Could Open Source Lead to a Meritocratic Search Engine?

“When Jimmy Wales recently announced the Search Wikia project,
an attempt to build an open-source search engine around the
user-driven model that gave birth to Wikipedia, he said his goal
was to create ‘the search engine that changes everything,’ as he
underscored in a February 5 talk at New York University. I think it
could, although not for the same main reasons that Wales has put
forth — I think that for a search engine to be truly meritocratic
would be more of a revolution than for a search engine to be
open-source, although both would be large steps forward. Indeed, if
a search engine could be built that really returned results in
order of average desirability to users, and resisted efforts by
companies to ‘game’ the system (even if everyone knew precisely how
the ranking algorithm worked), it’s hard to overstate how much that
would change things both for businesses and consumers. The key
question is whether such an algorithm could be created that
wouldn’t be vulnerable to non-merit-based manipulation. Regardless
of what algorithms may be currently under consideration by thinkers
within the Wikia company, I want to argue logically for some
necessary properties that such an algorithm should have in order to
be effective. Because if their search engine becomes popular, they
will face such huge efforts from companies trying to manipulate the
search results, that it will make Wikipedia vandalism look like a
cakewalk…”

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