WikiSeek (community edition) is a recently launched wiki-based community-editable search engine. Much like in a regular Wiki, the users can alter the actual search results, erase them, or add new ones. The service should not be confused with Wikiseek, a search engine for Wikipedia, and it is definitely still in beta, as it sits on a numeric IP address.

This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

This means that absolutely anyone can take any search query and change the results to anything they like. If this idea were ever to seriously take off, it would be a never-ending chain-editing/spamming fight for the important search queries.

You might think: but why, Wikipedia is community-edited, and it works so great!

Sure, but Wikipedia offers actual articles; (mostly) sensible pieces of text on a certain subject. Vandalism is easy to recognize. There are people who actually care about what Wikipedia says. Who’s going to want to edit a bunch of search results, unless it’s for their own personal goals?

What’s the possible outcome of this exercise, I wonder. Perhaps the wisdom of the crowd will overcome the petty squabbles of individuals and result in wonderfully accurate set of results. Or perhaps no one will ever be sure whose agenda is behind the results. If I had to choose one approach to search that will never, in a million years, be a threat to Google, it is this one.

Don’t believe me? Mike Arrington linked to the search results for his site, TechCrunch, in his article on Wikiseek. A the time of this writing, the second link (subtle, no one is going to notice that since it’s the second link) is already pointing to a third party site - GigaCrunch. Screenshot below.