Wikia Search Launches Alpha, Not Ready Yet

babooo404 writes "Jimmy Wales' latest project, Search Wikia has launched into alpha this morning. Most reviews have been negative. The system is a 'social search' and uses the Nutch search algorithm. You can friend people along with creating profiles, and the system uses a Wikipedia-style format for 'mini articles.'"

Aha, can't have proofs, but competes with google

[tjstork]

Ok, let me see if I understand this. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that can't have proofs or in depth reference materials, because more detail is out of scope for really no reason. But, they can somehow try and turn wiki into another google or a facebook.

Interesting!

Me thinks wiki should focus on its content.

no go

[jacquesm]

I tried it on a bunch of fairly simple queries and got nothing but extremely lousy results.

On the web first impressions really matter and I think wikia fails horribly in that respect.

Please Jimmy Wales go and fix wikipedia, it needs urgent attention, especially protection from editors running wild, and please, google go work on getting rid of that spam and fixing the rankings...

Work on wikipedia's search first

[mcsqueak]

Maybe this will be rolled into Wikipedia once it's done, but it seems me to that their search algorithm needs *plenty* of work. Thanks to the glories of SpellChecker, I can't spell worth a damn... when I misspell something in Wikipedia, it rarely finds it in the results, whereas Google always know what I meant to type AND OFFERS ME A CORRECTION. On Wikipedia, I have to go look how to spell whatever I'm searching for correctly, then put it back into Wikipedia's search just to find what I'm looking for.

Very frustrating...

Losing their way?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Wikipedia has a first-mover advantage and brand recognition in the encyclopedia domain. With all the silliness about Carolyn Doran, content whitewashing etc, it would seem that Wikipedia might be drifting from its core competence. That articles on Briney Speers' albumns are OK while proofs are not just shows that Wikipedia is really just another mass-market content site rather than a true knowledge source.

Competing in the search engine space just dilutes their effectiveness even more. Google currently links to Wikipedia and one might guess that a very large % of Wikipedia access comes via Google hits.

Re:Which part of ALPHA...

[anthony_dipierro]

Which part of Alpha did these guys not understand? It is, by definition, "Not Ready Yet"!

I always took "Alpha" to imply feature-complete.

I think it's kind of sad that Jimmy put something out and said, "Here's what it kinda will look like, and sorta how it will work," and people's first reaction is, "It's not a fully-functional working product? What a piece of crap."

Personally I think it's crap not because it doesn't work, but because there aren't any original good ideas to it. Mini articles are cool, but not at all original, and the idea that they're going to populate them solely from user contributions rather than taking them from a free content source or buying them from somewhere is dumb. Sure, rating results doesn't work, but again, not at all original, and probably not that useful unless and until there are millions of people using the thing. Then there's the whole Myspace/Facebook/whatever stuff. Not original, not well integrated into the rest of the site, not interesting to me, and not a good idea in the first place (to integrate the two).

Wales says "It's a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine." Fine, but how does Jimmy expect to get people to build a search engine for his for-profit business? There are answers to that question, but I don't see where Jimmy has hit on any of them. The Alpha that launched today doesn't seem geared to developers. Sure, when Wikipedia was launched it sucked. But at least I could edit it and make it not suck! And anything I added could be used by anywhere in the world, not just Jimmy Wales or Bomis. What can I do with Search Wikia? Add to the mini-articles? Lame.

Re:no go

[ZombieWomble]

I've read these comments, and I see two potential issues with them:

Firstly, he makes a comparison to Wikipedia on day one, and says how all anyone would see is a page with a "funny editing syntax". The problem is, from all reports I've seen, this new engine doesn't even have the equivalent - it's just a standard algorithmic search with a very limited site list at the moment. If it had the beginnings of a collaborative search engine it may be more interesting, but as far as I can see this is all "in the future", and right now its just a bad search engine gathering together tags from users.

Secondly, I think Jimmy has misjudged his market slightly - he seems to feel that Wikipedia was successful because of "openness, transparency, and participation". Personally, I would guess it was because Wikipedia was free, when most comparable knowledge sources were closed and expensive. Sure, the first few users were probably idealists to whom the above points were important, but it's the free aspect and the momentum they gained from that which has been the real source of Wikipedia's popularity, I suspect. Given they lack a similar advantage over the well-established search engines, I don't think Jimmy can get away with being so blase about not having any slick releases.