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.'"

Which part of ALPHA...

[KingSkippus]

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

Jimmy has pointed out that they're not even running against a real index yet, just a placeholder index. He even went so far as to say, "the search sucks today." The idea wasn't to launch a finished product that's ready for primetime. It wasn't even to launch a particularly working application. The point was to put something out there to demonstrate some rudimentary functionality while they continue to work towards something that does work.

You know, like a Beta.

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."

I think I'll wait a little longer before judging. If you don't like the concept, fine, don't like the concept. But to bust its chops because it's not fully functional is a bit premature and silly at this point.

Wikipedia's Blacklist In Use?

[_bug_]

I can't find anything in terms of documentation on Wikia, but it appears Wikia search is blocking sites on Wikipedia's blacklist [wikimedia.org] from being listed in the search engine. I've pulled a few examples from the blacklist and searched for them and have yet to receive any results on any of those searches.

Can anyone confirm or refute this? Maybe it's just because the Wikia is in alpha it hasn't indexed much yet?

If this is the case I'd probably steer clear of Wikia; I'm not sure I ant my search results to be filtered like that.

I am willing to be patient and give them a chance

[MarkWatson]

... before blasting the effort like the top level story poster.

BTW, last night I looked at their technical information site: http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia [wikia.com]

Some interesting stuff that I did not know about in their "Semantic lab".

Anyway, it is at least an interesting idea - time will tell how it works out for users, and as a business.

Wikipedia.org Search Sucks

[WebmasterNeal]

Has anybody used Wikipedia's normal search on their site. I can never find anything, It's horrible. Yahoo & Google do a much superior job with searches than they do on their own site. With that in mind, it doesn't make much sense for them to development a brand new search engine type thing when their own isn't that good.

I beg to differ

[SD-Arcadia]

Wikipedia is so awesome that it has changed by web habits, and half replaced google for me already. When I need to learn about something, from political events to computer games, I find myself starting off with a wikipedia search BEFORE going to google. I usually follow by visiting the external links from the wiki page. Great for getting to the "official page" of whatever I am interested if there is one, without crappy ad spam sites filling up the google search. Not a true knowledge source? Depends what you mean by "true", but Wiki pages beat the regular web for me hands down when what I want is just the naked knowledge and not a whole web page full of "content". Wiki gives me a concise body of text, and a relevant picture most of the times, no ads, no marketing, and no aggressive pushing of any kind of text, image, video etc. When you use wikipedia, you feel in control, while with the commercial nature of the web, you feel like a customer.

Re:I beg to differ

[charlequin]

It's only stupid to look at Wikipedia first if you have poor media literacy and don't know how to read it analytically (but then, in that case, you'd probably do poorly on a normal websearch as well.)

A pretty large portion of my websearches are out of idle curiosity or unimportant research (like fact-checking for a frivolous hobby purpose). For these purposes, going directly to Wikipedia is often quicker, easier, and freer of ads than a Google search. A scan of recent Wikipedia lookups on my laptop shows stuff like "American Gladiators," "Caffiene," "Somerville, MA," "Radiohead," "Woodrow Wilson" -- all topics for which I had, at best, passing interest at the time I looked them up.

When I'm interested in something more in-depth, Wikipedia's list of references and links can often provide a starting point of resources to consider that have already been pre-scanned by a human being. For a hot-button issue, it won't help me, but for, I dunno, Islamic democracy [wikipedia.org] (a relevant, modern topic) it provides me with a starting point of links and article references that I can check and judge the validity of myself.

For really, really important stuff it definitely wouldn't be my first (or second, or third) choice, but then... how often do you do really, really important stuff on the Internet compared to how often you want to know what year "Like a Prayer" came out or what the population density of Iowa is?

Searched for "Tampa hotels", got bottom-feeders

[Animats]

Wales was quoted recently complaining about Google's results for "Tampa hotels" [searchengineland.com], and talking about how Wikia was going to be better. So I searched Wikia for "Tampa hotels".

The first three results from Wikia search are all from the domain "visit-tampa-bay.com". That's one of those bottom-feeder ad link sites. The site is supposed to redirect traffic to Orbitz, but doesn't even do that right. Very disappointing result. Could they have been spammed already?

Trying "Tampa hotels" in Google gets us "travel.yahoo.com" for the top two results, which indicates that Google isn't biasing their search against their biggest competitor. Next is "traveladvisor.com". Those are OK results; you'd be able to get a hotel room that way.

Trying "Tampa hotels" in Yahoo search gets us a page from one of Yahoo's special cases. Yahoo knows about "hotels", so we get a list of hotels and prices from Yahoo, and three sponsored results. The top organic result is "tripadvisor.com", which is at least a big-name travel site, followed by "visittampabay.com" (not to be confused with "visit-tampa-bay.com"), the site for the local Convention and Visitor's Bureau. Yahoo certainly tries hard for hotel searches, and seems to be doing OK.

Trying "Tampa hotels" in MSN search gets results that look much like Yahoo's, but with lower result quality. MSN understands hotels as a special case. There are three sponsored results, and addresses and phone numbers for three real hotels. The first three organic search results are Yahoo Travel, "tampa-hotels.net" (an ad-laden landing page), and "tampa-hotels-discounts.net" (a bottom-feeder generic landing page that isn't even on topic.) Poor results.

Trying our own SiteTruth [sitetruth.com] the top result is "all-hotels.com", which has a list of hotels with pictures and a reservation interface. The second result is Yahoo Travel, and the third is Expedia. We're sorting Yahoo results on business legitimacy, so that's not surprising. OK here.

So there's where Wikia is today, on their recommended demo search.