Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 08 January 2008 15:26
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
The launch of an early alpha version of the Wikia search engine has
impressed few pundits with poor results and missing features, despite
Wikia founder Jimmy Wales imploring all not to expect Google-killing
results from day one. Will Wikia Search one day become wickedly good?
So big has the backlash been against the newly launched ‘alpha’ release of the
Wikia Search engine that Wikia have been forced to acknowledge in bold type, on their
‘about us’ page, that “We are aware that the quality of the search results is low”.
That much is true – the results are surprisingly poor, especially when compared with Google’s rich river of results for virtually any keyword.
But just as Wikipedia took time to blossom into its own rich content database of information, launching a highly developed Wikia from day one has clearly been far trickier than most have imagined.
Wikia - and Wikipedia – founder, Jimmy Wales, has been on the defensive across the web,
explaining in PC World that: “Search Wikia is an extremely alpha project. It's a project to build a search engine and not a full-fledged competitor to Google yet. We want to make sure people understand that it's in its very early days. I don't know how long it will take to reach industry-standard quality search results, but I'd say at least two years”.
Wikia’s own About US page says they are “working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine”, and that “Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way”.
They also say that: “Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often”.
What they’re saying is that the search engine will have the benefit of human power to filter the results, and this (among other features) will work to dramatically improve Wikia’s results over time.
But surely this is not the first 'human powered' search engine to hit the web - for answers on others that exist, what else Wikia promises, and what is Wikia based on, please read onto page 2 to continue.
