HAVE you already tried Wikia Search, the new search engine from the people behind Wikipedia? This project has been one year in the making, but the alpha version is now open to the public. (By the way, as I previously blogged, Google interestingly enough has announced a Wikipedia-like service called Knol.)
I’m trying it out but as you can expect at this early stage, there’s no way I’d choose this over Google. Wikia Search is pretty up front about the quality of its search results at this stage:
Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.
We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..
Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.
Right now, the most important thing you can do is help with the “miniarticles” that appear at the top of popular search terms. These will vary in purpose according to the circumstance, but the primary uses will be:
- Short definitions
- Disambiguations
- Photos
- See also
This is what’s interesting about Wikia Search — the attempt to complement its own software-based search with the “wisdom of the crowd.” In other words, Wikia Seach volunteers will be sifting through the results in an attempt to make the results more relevant to users.
Remember back in the old days of the Web, when searching for content was divided between using search engines versus browsing Internet directories (like the original Yahoo! and Yehey)? We’ve come a long way since then, but it’s still a never-ending battle to make information manageable, easily accessible and relevant to users.
It will be interesting to see whether somewhere down the road, this social element will enable Wikia Search to give more useful results than Google. As you might expect, Wikia Search also has social networking aspects, which you’ll access when you sign up for a new account.
Check it out.
