Wikia, Why?

So Wikia launched. There’s been no shortage of generally negative posts about it. I’ll add my voice to that dog pile.

The problem for me isn’t that its search results suck. It’s a preview or alpha release (or whatever) and it needs a little time to scale up, no that’s not the problem. The problem for me is that it leaves me wondering what the hell makes it interesting and what have they been working on? It seems to me that they are using Grub and Nutch as their engine. So they didn’t start from scratch and are working with an established free software community around those two software projects.

The whole schtick of it was supposed to be community based ranking. The only community on the site is a tacked on profile and friends system that’s pretty standard fare. And it’s got a “mini-page” tacked on to the top of any given search - this seems like a trivial use of existing wiki software - it doesn’t figure out any underlying search thought, it simply associates a wiki page with a case insensitive copy of your search terms.

What is the point of launching this? There’s no revolution here - Mahalo, as much as I think it is not a workable idea distinguishes itself from other engines with it’s unique take on search results. Wikia seems to have taken two open source projects, glued on a stock social network implementation and glued on a little block of text at the top. I’m just not sure what Wikia wants me to take away from this launch.

I mean, social networking isn’t something I’d think of when I think of search… and Wikia does nothing to make me reconsider that. What does this add to my essential search experience? Maybe when there’s more to actually do, community-wise, with the search it will make sense, but that’s just it, there’s nothing you can actually do so from whence flows any sense of community? From nowhere.

I have no idea whether Wikia’s Search is going to be awesome or not. Sadly this release doesn’t even hint at what the point of it is. Jimmy Wales said this long ago:

“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Where is this new method? It’s the fundamental point of this search and this release which should have highlighted how that works doesn’t even mention it, much less give you a way to affect it. It needs to go back into the oven for a lotta more baking.

Jan 8th, 2008 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: review · search