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The launch of the highly anticipated Wikia search engine has received unprecedented coverage on the Internet. The general consensus around the web is that it has been a disappointment and even a “Complete Letdown.” considering the sister site that it evolved from Wikipedia was such a huge success. My brief personal experience with it can be summed up in two words – “It sucks!” The quality of the result sets simply does not give me what I am looking for… not even close.
The two main features of the search services that was supposed to differentiate itself are:
- It is open source, meaning that anyone interested and bored enough can look through its core search algorithm and therefore making it an open system as oppose to the other search engines which are essentially a black boxes.
- User are able to provide feedback and ultimately effect the results of searches. It is argued that, in the same way that people power have made Wikipedia one of the most used and trust knowledge repository, it would also make Wikia Search a reliable and trusted search engine by unleashing the social aspects of search.
I am interested in the point that “People Power” would make a better engine.
Interesting idea and it definitely fires up the imagination in light of the pure machine/algorithm powered search provided by Google.
Yahoo has long touted the potential of Social powered Search (since it can’t compete with Google on pure machine power I guess!), and De.licio.us is one great example where I believe it has unearthed some of that potential.
The combination of shared bookmarking, tagging and networking not only makes this a wonderful personal online bookmarking tool, searching with De.licio.us also means you will find gems that other people have discovered and bookmarked!
The argument goes that if someone has bookmarked it, the content must be of decent quality, particularly if a lot of people have bookmarked it and hence the power of the Social Network!
The search experience is different as you know it is powered by people and you have different expectations. At the end of the day, when it comes to finding quality content on the web, Del.licio.us certainly provides an interesting and reliable alternatives. Logic also tells us that as more people use it, the coverage of the web will increase and the quality of the results would also increase!
As for Wikia Search, Jim Wales the founder of Wikia has asked us to be patient. I am not so sure if people have that much patience when it comes to Search now since the bar has been set so high now…
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