This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 9:41 am and is filed under SEO Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Wiki search could be wicked sweet..
A friend of mine, Adam Moro, wrote a pretty cool article about the proposed Wiki Search engine. He brought up some great points (You can check his post out here) and also made me think about a couple of things…
I do believe that if a Wiki Search engine is done correctly it could be a very cool new way of seeing “The peoples choice,” but my concern is rooted in the seemingly unavoidable possibility of massive editing wars for top 10 positions in the results. Think of it this way, there are 10 companies (i’m being conservative here) all vying for the “holy grail”, (or so the N00bs call it) number-one spot. Who’s to say that editing of certain keyword phrases would ever allow the results to be “trustworthy” or even an accurate reflection of what John Q. Public actually wants? I mean, wasn’t this one of the original ideas behind personalized search?
Think about it, if the keyword is important enough to their online business model, large companies would stop at virtually nothing to ensure top placement of their website for that term. In my honest opinion, this leans towards search results appearing to be more of a big banking resource than a democracy.
Edit: Ok, So I went and checked out Wiki Seek and spent a little time on the site and I have to say that I am really not all that thrilled with it thus far. The “refine by category” box up at the top is too large and annoying. Personally, I like to be able to see the #1 organic result without having to scroll down at all when I am using a SE. With the search bar, refine by category, and then the HUGE sponsored results box, I have to scroll in order to see any of the organic stuff. That really bugs me.
This could be the result of being spoiled by Google and their minimalist way of displaying my results, but I don’t care. I want it the way I want it! 
Also, when entering a new term into the search bar, the “refine by category” information changes. Not only is this distracting, it’s also really annoying in my opinion.
Overall, I can see the idea behind this site was good, but the implementation is lacking IMHO.
January 23rd, 2007 at 2:03 pm
“Who’s to say that editing of certain keyword phrases would ever allow the results to be “trustworthy” or even an accurate reflection of what John Q. Public actually wants?”
I’m willing to bet that the above mentioned is one of the biggest reasons this hasn’t been implemented with the Wiki capability.
Anyone with enough money could hire someone to do nothing but monitor changes to desired keywords and change them back. Worse yet, automation comes into play and ruins everything for everyone.
Nice blog ‘Shirley Tipsy’, consider it Delicious!
JJ