People-powered search was served a setback today when Wiki-Lord Jimmy Wales ceremonially cut the throat of Wiki Search. Can an “Aloha” to similarly person-powered Mahalo be far behind? More specifically, is this the beginning of the end for user generated results.
Adherents of human-derived search results point to the adoption by Google of some user control with their trickily wacky-named Search Wiki, but those results only show up for folks who are logged into Google accounts and only affect their individual results pages and are not applied to anyone else.
What has limited Mahalo’s growth and fatally limited Wikia Search is that users prefer not to have to adjust search results themselves. Most people would prefer to simply get the most relevant results the first time. More importantly, what might be relevant to one searcher may not be relevant to another. Rather than expect the individual user or even a community of users to determine relevance, the major engines like Live, Yahoo and Google are all using other means to better tailor search results.
Keeping track of previous searches, geo-location and basic tracking of where the searcher has come from and where they end up clicking all serve up targeted results using algorithms that remain invisible to users. Whether the results are relevant depends on who you talk to and what they search for, but there’s no evidence that introducing a human element solves this issue.
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