Wikia Search Alpha Goes Live

By Greg McNevin

January 8, 2008: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ much anticipated search engine project Wikia Search has finally launched, however, the service has so far met with more negativity than praise.

Like the community-edited Wikipedia, Wikia Search is an attempt to bring the power of open source and social networks to the world of search, and put a more transparent service up against the Google behemoth.

Design-wise the site takes a leaf out of Google’s book of simplicity with just a logo and search bar, and the engine reportedly currently contains between 50 and 100 million pages, although Wales notes that this is just a placeholder index. Users can sign up and create a public profile, with many aspects of the service looking like it is meshing Facebook with Google – even if social interaction is limited for the time being.

Despite it only being a very early version, the Alpha has been greeted quite negatively by many commentators, with some claiming it offers but a cursory glance at the net, and others, such as TechCrunch.com’s Michael Arrington, dubbing it a complete letdown.

Of course the project’s main aim is perpetual improvement thanks to community vetting of search results, so as it has essentially had no community involvement so far, Wales himself notes that Wikia Search is far from prime time, saying it’s a project to build a search engine, not a real search engine – yet.

“We want to make sure people understand that it's in its very early days,” Wales said, adding that he expects it to be up to two years until the engine is producing results rivalling the accuracy of other industry heavyweights.

“Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea,” writes Wales in response to TechCrunch.com’s comments. “So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.

“We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different.”

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