Wikia Search Launches in Alpha
Jimmy Wales’ (the man behind Wikipedia) much-hyped answer to Internet search, Wikia Search, has just gone live in its alpha state. The site is a bit up-and-down at the moment as is to be expected with an alpha launch but overall after using it for the past 20 minutes I have to say I’m much more intrigued by this than I thought I would be.
That said, the most important element – the search results – are fairly hit or miss so far. For example a search of ‘google reader’ takes me to a number of Google services but none are actually Google Reader on the first 3 pages. In fact it takes to page 2 to even get a result that is actually about Google Reader. Perhaps this is a bad choice to use for an example though as Google is clearly now a competitor. Wikia also doesn’t offer you much if you spell a search inquiry wrong, which no doubt a lot of people do when searching.
The social elements of the site actually look quite simple and nice (not surprisingly a bit like the great Wikia-powered social sports site ArmchairGM) – not at all like the straight-up Facebook rip-off that was seen in leaked pictures. You can have friends, photo albums, activities, personal and work information, and a ‘white board’ (think Facebook’s ‘wall’). There is also a ’status’ area as has become the new social custom.
Obviously it’s this social aspect that could end up being the true strength of the service. While not fully functional yet, the idea is to eventually have the users help perfect the search results a la Wikipedia. While this will probably won’t be as people-based hands-on as a Mahalo, it should allow for more user-input than Google.
It’s nice to do a search of ‘MG Siegler’ and see my profile come up as a separate result on the right-hand side. A lot of other services are out there right now specializing in people search as I wrote about back in July, but none have successfully married actual search with people search so far. It will be interesting to see if Google comes out with something to match this in 2008 with their social push – I would not be at all surprised to see that.
It’s still early in the game but I’d say Wikia looks decent for a project in ‘alpha’ phase. They need to do some major work on search results, but the same can be said still for Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s search engines when compared to Google’s. I was worried about the social aspect being a straight Facebook rip-off, but it appears to have more depth than that – a bigger question may be if people are already too inundated with social networks to sign up for a new one?
You can find my Wikia Search profile here if you want to add me as a friend.
More thoughts:
