2016-03-18 21:44 GMT-07:00 SarahSV sarahsv.wiki@gmail.com:
On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 5:17 PM, carl hansen carlhansen1234@gmail.com wrote:
https://about.commonsearch.org/
"We are building a nonprofit search engine for the Web"
Sounds alot like Knowledge Engine, if there were such a thing. Any overlap with wikimedia projects?
Thanks for the link, Carl. Erik and Lydia are advisors, so perhaps they could say a bit more about it.
Sylvain has been working on this stuff for a while, blissfully ignorant of Wikimedia's discussions of search engines, rocketships and so on. He reached out to me shortly before the public announcement and we've talked a bit about governance, community & funding models. I've agreed to provide some continued advice along the way but have not otherwise been involved.
He recently posted on wikitech-l asking for suggestions how Wikipedia/Wikidata could be integrated: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2016-March/084984.html
There's a lot of heavy lifting still until Common Search can become a viable project even for narrowly defined purposes but I think it's a very worthwhile effort. It also is -- I think correctly -- based on the largest pre-existing open effort to index the web, the Common Crawl. This could lead to a mutually beneficial relationship between Common Search and Common Crawl. From a Wikimedia perspective, it might develop into an opportunity to jointly showcase some of the amazing stuff that Wikidata can already do.
Erik