Privy

We all know how negative our media has become these days. Bad news is flashed whole day and any good news (other than cricket) fails to make the cut for the decision makers who prefer sensational non-news over really impactful developments.

khushkhabari.com is a unique concept where in news is collected from various sources and ordered according to how good it is. A news is determined as good depending upon how the sites users feel about it: good or bad. The about page of the site mentions its inspiration in Dr. A.P. J Abdul Kalam’s speech on Israeli media.

A news had appeared on the site (through Yahoo! News) which talked about a Meghalaya village being rated as the cleanest in Asia. Now this is a news that most of us have likely missed. Imagining a village in India being cleanest is Asia is really a feel good news.

The site’s success, however, depends upon its users. Just like wikipedia, if its users don’t vandalize the news ratings, it might be a very useful source of good news.

Google seems to recently have added a new feature called SearchWiki, that allows users to re-order the search results for their own future reference. This reordering however will remain only for the same logged in user and not influence the search results of other users.

Now, what prompted Google to bring out such a feature? The answer lies at this url.

Yes, Wikia is the same organization behind the much popular Wikipedia (which is increasingly becoming more reliable, rather handy, than Google search itself). Wikia had promised an open source search engine sometime back and this service was launched quietly.

Wikia search as such is quite a pain as of now with respect to results and it looks like it wants more feed today than what it can milk. But, Google as always is in an advantageous position, because even competition contributes to its revenues. Did you wonder why wikia shows Ads by Google?