Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 08 January 2008 15:26
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
No, it’s not the first time ‘human powered’ search engines have debuted – in the dot com days, search companies such as Looksmart and others employed human editors to create directories and improve search engine results. Others have been created more recently, although none are that notable - see
Anoox for an example.
While those search engines are around no longer, sites such as Digg, Youtube and many others use the power of users to determine the popularity and flow of content, something that Wikia Search would like to tap into as successfully as Wikipedia has.
Wikia also houses a social networking component to the search engine, allowing users to create profiles, share information and update results with “mini articles” that appear at the top of popular search terms.
Wikia say that they will be used for “short definitions, disambiguations, photos and see also” information, and although the search engine has only been operational for about one day, the mini articles section is starting to be filled with some images.
If Wikia had decent results, it would be a far stickier site, but for now and the foreseeable future, you’d be better off searching inside of Wikipedia itself than relying on Wikia for answers if you didn’t want to use traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask.
Celebrity US blogger Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch, among others,
slammed Wikia for being “a complete letdown”, and released far too early thanks to a self imposed launch by the end of 2007 (something that was clearly missed) and criticising Jimmy Wales for hyping Wikia as a Google killer and then launching such a ‘disappointing’ product.
So what did Jimmy Wales say? Please read onto page 3 for the conclusion.
