Wikia Search Launches in Alpha, Slammed with Bad Reviews

Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 7, 2008 | 3 Comments

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The long-anticipated search engine from the people behind Wikipedia, Wikia Search, launched today in alpha to mostly poor reviews. Mathew Ingram sums up the blogosphere’s reactions at The Globe and Mail:

Mike Arrington — the editor of TechCrunch, a technology blog that can help to make or break companies with a favourable review — called the service a “letdown,” while the Centernetworks blog described it as “not ready” for prime time. Stan Schroeder, who writes for a popular tech blog called Mashable, said point-blank that Wikia Search “sucks.” Others were even less complimentary.

After a year of hype and $14 million poured into this project, the resulting search engine interface is pretty (and they win cutest search engine logo, for sure) but the actual search results are indeed disappointing: Mashable’s Stan Shroeder notes that the first result for “Wikipedia” is a German listing, and Search Engine Roundtable points to abysmal results for “George Bush.” Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim also writes that Wikia Search looks very susceptible to SEO black-hat tricks, which may kill the project outright.

But it’s important to remember that Wikia Search’s human-powered, social-search approach means that the search results pages will be thin until people start using and contributing to the engine (or rather, if they do so). This is not unlike challenges faced by another social search engine, Mahalo, which is faring a lot better than people had expected. In TechCrunch comments, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales himself admits/defends the engine’s shortcomings (as does this caveat on the Wikia Search about page), noting that Wikipedia had a similar paltry start, and he says Wikia Search is a project to build a search engine, not the completed search engine itself:

So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.

We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different.

Wikia Search relies on user-written Mini Articles (here’s one about Google), but it’s strange that they don’t utilize the already user-written content from Wikipedia to help fill these out – why reinvent their own wheel rather than take advantage of their massive content base? It would be a mistake to write off Wikia Search outright, so we’re filing this one under sites to check back on.

3 Responses to “Wikia Search Launches in Alpha, Slammed with Bad Reviews”

  1. [...] Reaktionen innerhalb von 24 Stunden : Wikia Search noch keine Konkurrenz für Google ( news ch ) | Wikia Search Launches in Alpha , Slammed with Bad Reviews ( searchviews ) | The Spare Design of Wikia Search ( Business Week ) | Google You’re OK : Wikia [...]

  2. Sergey Rusak says:

    Almost every SEO / Web Marketing / Technology blogger wrote about Wikia Search … I did not find any good review yet. Everyone are saying that it is really bad.

    I don’t know why people work hard and invest their money into niche which already booked by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.

  3. Stamatios says:

    Regarding utilizing Wikipedia’s content, I believe there are legal & ethical issues associated with such a decision. Remember: Wikipedia was founded and still operates on non-for-profit grounds. Wikia is meant to be a for-profit initiative. If someone agreed to participate or provide content to Wikipedia based on a non-for-profit base, it would be illegal to use this person’s content for profit generation. Simply, in terms of content (mini pages), and unfortunately, Wikia will be restricted by Wikipedia.

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