Online Wisdom Coming In A New Flavor?

Wikipedia has become one of the most authoritative sources of information online or offline. Part of Wikipedia's enormous success has been thanks to the prominent placement Wikipedia has enjoyed at Google, often in the top few listings for common, highly competitive terms.

Today, Google announced a new project that may become even more popular as a source of authoritative information, currently nicknamed the knol project.

Knol is a unique information experiement in that it will create an authoritative article about any topic and then allow feedback and comments from the community. I'm not clear how initial authority to write these will be determined, but I'm guessing Google's academic orientation will show here and they'll very appropriately require some form of academic, literary, or business credential before allowing people to post on topics.

The web has only begun to scratch the power of community as an arbiter of quality. Digg uses voting, while Wikipedia uses a group editing model. It appears knol will offer voting and the ability to add to the article, though not change it.

Google's New SearchMash Site

Google has launched a new non-Google branded site called SearchMash which is designed to serve as an experimental testing ground for user interface ideas without the Google brand skewing the objectivity of the results.

Here are 14 observations on SearchMash:
1. The character count on the SearchMash homepage is even less than the Google.com classic homepage.
2. With SearchMash, there is no search button but there are instructions to 'hit enter to get results' but those directions disappear on the search results page. I always hit 'enter' myself versus clicking the "Google Search" button and I never click "I'm Feeling Lucky". I wonder how many people actually do.
3.The SERP page on SearchMash has a frame for the header which houses the search text field so it doesn't scroll with the page.
4. On SearchMash, you can only search web pages by default whereas Google shows you the options to search for images, videos, news, maps, blogs, etc. but SearchMash automatically gives you results for web, images, blogs, videos, and wikipedia oddly enough.
5. My search for 'flowers' on SearchMash yielded about half the number of results (14,200,000) than on Google (22,600,000). There is no time of how long it took to generate the results, the number of results showing on the page, or definitions.
6. The search results are on the left, and the images, blogs, videos, and wikipedia results are in the right rail along with a feedback survey which doesn't take you off the page. It doesn't seem to save your feedback results on the page if you navigate away to another site and then come back or do another type of search like image/blog/video/wikipedia and and go back to web search.
7. There is no pagination. There are ten results by default, designated by a "..." divider (not sure that's necessary) and when you click a link for 'more web results' or hit the space bar, the page expands downward until, in this case, I hit 100 results (so not sure what happened to my 14,300,000 results) versus paging to more pages as on Google.
8. The results are numbered which is also different from its Google counterpart.
9. The color palette is the same kind of blue and white just a softer blue and no yellow designated 'Sponsored Links' section and no heavy demarcation of section areas. So, if there are any paid links, they are not called out in anyway.
10. The font size is smaller by default (12px), all the text is the same size, the blue is a little brighter and there is no underlining by default for links (not even on mouseover but opting instead for background highlighting).
11. You can click to see images or blogs or video results which then loads in the left channel and web results moves to the top right column and whichever type of result you've clicked on doesn't show up on the right.
12. You can click on 'hide details' in the title bar to collapse the display of web or images results, allowing more results to fit in view.
13. Searches seem ranked the same as on Google.
14. From your SERP, you can also search within a site. So, my search yielded 1800flowers.com as a result, which I could click on to navigate to or search their site for 'flowers'. Cool! It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

Vote for Cool Software

That's what Intel wants you to do with the launch of their new website called CoolSW. They are using collective intelligence to help sift through the millions of software companies to find the best one. They've created a social ranking system that allows them to find what's "Cool." I have to admit the software that currently has the most votes in the 'digital home' category is pretty cool. It's a web service that allows people to draw floor plans online, or upload images of floor plans which are converted automatically into 3D Google Earth. Would they have found this company and the many others listed with the 90K+ employees they have? Maybe eventually but they've decided to take the shorter route and rely on anyone who wants to participate in helping them identify and rate cool technology.

This isn't a new concept, people have always gathered together to share information but the internet and the advancements of Web 2.0 allow us to share this information more freely. And those who have taken advantage of this have illustrated the powerful result:

• Google became the number one search engine by using 'PageRank' which uses the search behavior of millions of people to improve relevancy.
• Wikipedia has become the world's largest and arguably the most accurate encyclopedia.
• Innocentive opens up tough R&D problems for anyone to solve - since 2005, 58 of these tough problems have been solved by over 120,000 solvers.
• Cisco's Connected Life Contest resulted in over 600 technology ideas in 3-months that will be used to drive product strategy.

It has been proven that collective intelligence works and those who have jumped on the bandwagon have the competitive advantage. How have you seen 'the power of many' used successfully?