--- Ed Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have a lot of respect for Google, but I don't like monopolies, whether it > is Microsoft or Google. I think it is vitally important that there be > several viable search competators. > > I wish this wicki one luck. As I said, it sounds a lot like your idea.
Partly. The main difference is that I am also proposing a message posting service, where messages become instantly searchable and are also directed to persistent queries. Wikia has a big hurdle to get over. People will ask "how is this better than Google?" before they bother to download the software. For example, Grub (distributed spider) uses a lot of bandwidth and disk without providing much direct benefit to the user. The major benefit of Wikia seems to be that users provide feedback on relevance to query responses, which in theory ought to provide a better ranking algorithm than something like Google's PageRank. But assuming they get enough users to get to this level, spammers could still game the system by flooding the network with with high rankings for their websites. In a distributed message posting service, each peer would have its own policy regarding which messages to relay, keep in its cache, or ignore. If a document is valuable, then lots of peers would keep a copy. A client could then rank query responses by the number of copies received weighted by the peer's reputation. Spammers could try to game the system by adding lots of peers and flooding the network with advertising, but this would fail because most other peers would be configured to ignore peers that don't provide reciprocal services by routing their own outgoing messages. Any peer not so configured would quickly be abused and isolated from the network in the same way that open relay SMTP servers get abused by spammers and blacklisted by spam filters. Of course a message posting service would have a big hurdle too. Initially, the service would have to be well integrated with the existing Internet. Client queries would have to go to the major search engines, and there would have to be websites set up as peers without the user having to install software. Most computers are not configured to run as servers (dynamic IP, behind firewalls, slow upload, etc), so peers will probably need to allow message passing over client HTTP (website polling), by email, and over instant messaging protocols. File sharing networks became popular because they offered a service not available elsewhere (free music). But I don't intend for the message posting service to be used to evade copyright or censorship (although it probably could be). The protocol requires that the message's originator and intermediate routers all be identified by a reply address and time stamp. It won't work otherwise. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=73286384-77b385
