Cross-posted because this raises interesting questions of leveraging top-down machine generated content on the cheap and trying to make it social not only for monetization — but enclosure and bottom-up participation to enhance quality.

This is pretty interesting.  Web’s Biggest not only claims to be the biggest search engine, but the biggest wiki. 

It leverages existing search engines and scrapes the whois database.  The spider captures summaries, which is all the engine searches, which gives you easy breadth, but not depth.  The summaries are far from perfect, but it seems the idea is they are meant to be changed.  A smart hack, if legal (Andy Beal wonders if this violates whois guidelines).

Users can edit search results and must provide their email addresses to be notified when there is an edit.  Past edits are stored below.  This doesn’t make it a wiki whatsoever, its closer to blog comments, but an annotated search engine isn’t a bad idea.  The founding concept for Google wasn’t a search engine, but developing the annotated web.  Kwiki-based Wikalong is the closest to that in the wiki world, blogs are the analog.

Revenue model seems to be some advertising, but mostly paid directory listings and driving comissioned activity to other search engines.  In effect, anyone can modify the site summary, and you pay for a more permanent directory description alongside the chaos.  So text ads are defending your territory, perhaps extortion could be a good business if it became popular or useful for reasons I can’t fathom.

Even if its not a wiki, it raises an interesting question.  Can you automate information collection and then rely on bottom-up participation to make it useful?  This is the opposite pattern of social software, where you may apply some automation to help sift through and reveal social signals.  Wikipedia had one autopopulation in its history, importing the CIA World Factbook, but it didn’t stimulate much refining activity.  Web’s Biggest tries to incent participation through small enclosed interests and email notification to return, but I’d bet that real community is a much stronger force.