Eh, sometimes I love this blog simply because here I can write with no holds barred. You can read my assessment of Wikia Search over at Mashable, but the fact of the matter is, it was hard writing it because if it weren’t Wikia’s project, I’d probably dismiss it in seconds.
In the search game, if you want to distinguish yourself from the pack, you have to be good. Really good. Wikia Search is not good - its search engine leaves a lot to be desired; options are scarce, and the social networking part is not really integrated with the search, so why have it?
This is one of those projects that might get closed down in two months and rebuilt from the scratch on a different engine - that’s how bad it seems at this point.
Stan
You are a moron. Jimmy made it very clear that this launch product would suck big time. This is why it is in Alpha.
How stupid can you be to compare it to Google?
Go do something else.
If Wikia really wants to make this a community-generated search engine than the demo attached will do just that - http://tinyurl.com/yvah8w
PredictAd Search Assist has a collaborative filtering feature that learns community search patterns. If you start typing in the demo attached you will start getting autocomplete results (with contextual advertisements) - these results will optimize based on the popularity of certain search terms/phrases.
If Jimmy Wales is reading - take a close look…PredictAd is FREE and its contextual advertising platform gives the publisher something that Adwords simply doesn’t! Moreover, it’s the first Ajax service offered on the web, and it’s a cool one at that…
@John: good morning to you too. So, wait a minute, Jimmy made it very clear that the product will suck. And I said it sucks. So, I’m wrong…how?
Re: comparing it with Google, well, if you create a search engine, you’re going to get compared with Google. That’s how it works.
@Jim: your comment is mostly an ad for your service, and it’s not directly relevant, but generally I agree: there are dozens of other search engines out there that are just as interesting as Wikia Search, or more.
As far as Jimmy’s idea that Wikia Search will grow similarly to Wikipedia, I don’t see the connection. It’s easy to participate in Wikipedia; anyone can do it. What can one do if they want to participate in Wikia Search and make it better? Help work on their open source search code? Only a tiny fraction of people can do that. In all honesty, if you want your open source project to thrive on the wings of the community, you still have to give them something extraordinary to start with.
I am agree with this post. It’s don’t work well.
I don’t think Wikia works well at the moment, but is the point that the community will grow it. If bloggers like us recognize the potential now, couldn’t we steal a march on the late comers and make it mutually useful right now?
db
PS When there’s glare on my laptop screen I can barely read the comments and links on your blog as they’re very pale…