We recently launched the new version of Mwmbl which includes the long-awaited feature of allowing users to curate search results. This is an experiment, since we don’t know:
- Will people want to curate search results?
- How will we determine what is an objectively good search ranking?
- How will we deal with and prevent spam?
- How will we build and manage the community?
- Can we use curated search results as training for learning to rank?
- Will this be better than the heuristics used by the big search engines?
and probably a lot more important things I haven’t thought of. But this is why it is exciting! If we knew everything already, it would be boring.
Early indications are that at least a small proportion of people are happy to give curation a go, and we’re already seeing a bit of self-promotion, which is fine, for now. We’ll deal with it if and when it becomes a problem.
If this experiment works, it will be a watershed moment for web search. Search rankings will be in the hands of the community and not the big companies. And that is our mission.