davewray - 5:27 pm on Dec 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

Sure, corruption could enter into the equation of Wale's new plans for a user-edited search engine. However, there are ways around this. 10 billion pages? I highly doubt there are that many legitimate, indexable pages out there. What one could do is once a human reviews the page and gives it a "yes", or "no", that page could be saved so that the "search engine" knows exactly what the user approved. Every couple of weeks a bot could be sent out to scan all pages approved and check for any significant modifications. If, let's say, over 30% of the page's content has been changed, a human would have the opportunity to re-check that page to make sure it hasn't been changed for the worse. That's a rudimentary way to combat it...far from perfect I know, but still a way around the corruption.

I think we can all agree that SE's will Always be worked over by certain individuals to their advantage. They key for SE's is to limit that corruption of listings. Google can't do it 100% right, so why should we expect this new "Amazon" engine to do it? Any and all competition to Google would be good. Good competition is good for users and advertisers alike (possibly not good for the SE's though).

Cheers,
Dave.