Wikia Archive

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has the lead on a story coming out of Wikia HQ about their decision to open source the social networking platform they have been using on their own properties. ArmchairGM, their sports offering and Halopedia for Halo gaming fans are two examples of the software in use.

The idea of integration between a social network and the very popular Mediawiki software is very strong. Marshall explains what’s available in this open source release, ‘The source code released offers Wikia’s features for profile creation, avatar upload, friending (and “foeing” – the making of enemies in a network!), and a Facebook-”Wall” style messaging system for individual and group friend messaging called the Board. These features are now available for Mediawiki-based sites anywhere on the web, including for commercial use.’

It’s unfortunate however that the editor within the social networking section is still so gosh darn ugly. Here is a snippit of what the code looks like:

====Play-in (March 13th, 2007):====

”’Niagara over Florida A&M 85-83”’

The 22-11 Niagara Purple Eagles took the final spot in the 2007 NCAA March Madness tournament with a 2-point win over the Florida A&M Rattlers, despite being down by 5 at the half. A&M goes home, while the Purple Eagles move onto a first round matchup against number 1 Kansas. This is where the fun begins.

[[Image:73616024.jpg|right|200px|thumb|Charron Fisher led Niagara to the Tourney with a win over Florida A&M, but wasn't able to lead the Purple Eagles to a big upset win against Kansas, as the Eagles lost by 33.]]

While there are some WYSIWYG buttons, the editor is still lacking (as it is in Mediawiki as well). Companies like Wetpaint (and maybe the new Google Sites) allow for a much friendlier experience.

In the end, this move could help to extend Wikis into the space currently owned by Ning, KickApps and Magnify as together “Wiki + Digg + Social Network” is a very strong combination.

I wanted to love the Wikia Search from the minute I joined the mailing list months ago. I was very excited to see the photos of the servers being loaded into the racks and was looking forward to using the alpha. I was one of the first to get access and so far, sadly, I have to say that it doesn’t "wow" me. When I spoke with the PR person, she said that they let Wikipedia out early and look how well it worked. I noted that Wikipedia basically had no competitors and that helped it get a 1st mover advantage. I am sure that any review you read of Wikia Search today, you will see comparisons to Google, Yahoo, Mahalo and Hakia.

I spoke with Jimmy Wales for a few minutes on Friday. He said they are looking for (eventually) a 5% market share and will be showing ads later on. He said Wikia Search is a "general Web search" and competes with Google, Yahoo, and Ask. The biggest positive I see so far is that the Wikia Search team is very open to feedback and appears to be building this search engine with the community in mind.

Update: Check out a couple of other reviews as well from Mike Arrington and Paris Lemon. Of course read mine below first :)

Search Engine

The search engine works just like any other search engine. They use "Nutch" for the algorithm and display the numerical result for each result next to the text. I sure hope that this scoring is only shown for the Alpha/Beta as no mainstream user cares about what the score for a result is, they just want the best result. The indexed sites list is small and is growing so finding accurate results is a bit tricky. A search for Web 2.0 didn’t return anything that seemed correct, though searching for TechCrunch did provide a more accurate set of results. Rex suggested that I do a vanity search — the results were the NYU Stern School of Business along with about 8 other .de German "Stern" web sites. Do a search for sex and you can see why they need to index more results asap.

There is one function on the search that is new and pretty groovy. Instead of reloading the page to see the next batch of results, the page just expands on the click to show the next batch. This is very cool and has high usability but it might be limiting for cpm-based advertising.

Social Aspects

One of the major pieces of the Wikia Search are the social aspects. When you setup your profile, the keywords you attach allow you to show up in searches for those keywords. I like this because it can help you to find others that are interested in the same topics you are and build new relationships.

You can also create a profile page which is similar to a profile page on any social network. Even though I am not a fan of all of these profile pages, I have to give the nod here to Mahalo’s social page only because Mahalo lets you associate other network accounts. I can show my delicious, digg, facebook, etc. You can also friend people just like with any other social network.

Mini Articles

"Mini Articles" are basically stubs with links to full wiki pages. When you search for any term, above the results is a Mini Article which anyone can edit. The articles link goes to a full wiki page about the subject which again anyone can edit. I believe these Mini Articles will have tons of abuse. Jimmy said that there will be community admins who will be selected by Jimmy to keep the spam and blackhat activities out. He said payment will be unlikely which leads me to believe that it will be easy to game the system, even though Jimmy said on our call that "gaming is impossible".

Conclusion

Overall I would say that Wikia Search has a long way to go in terms of interface, usability and features to get me to want to change (or add) it to the search engines. I understand that it’s in Alpha and things will improve and change as the plan moves forward, however I would have liked it to be a bit more polished before hitting the public eye.

Welp, now we have the word directly from Jimmy Wales via the Wikia Search mailing list I am on (see below). This comes after the IRC comment from yesterday. Looks like the alpha is live now and the public launch in approximately two weeks. I’ve already requested an invite – guessing that if I get in, I won’t be allowed to post about what I see – which I will certainly abide by as I always do.

Here’s the email:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Re: [Search-l] private pre-alpha invites available

Ping me if you want one…. we’re launched. :-) I’m going to be letting people in slowly over the next few days and we are aiming for a January 7th public launch. We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken… Best way to ask is by email, but please don’t be offended if I don’t answer right away. I am expecting a bit of a flood here. –Jimbo

I am looking forward to reviewing the product!

Apparently Jimmy Wales was cornered on IRC today and made the following statement about the launch of Wikia Search. The quote was posted on the Unofficial Search Wikia blog.

[15:14] <jwales> the search engine *will* launch before the end of the year, probably in private beta first, and then open to the public in early january. No specific dates are certain yet. But sooon.

It was less than a week ago that we saw the 1,000 servers being delivered. They got those power cords in quick!

Over the past week, one of the messages on the Wikia search mailing list I am on asked for an update on the Wikia search project. To which Jimmy Wales replied with, "On track, we are hard at work right now…" and displayed the image below. The Unofficial Search Wikia blog was able to pin down Wales’ on IRC and got the following comment:

Many people have speculated that this is for a crawl and/or Hadoop cluster and this was confirmed by Jimmy Wales on IRC when I asked if the servers were for a web crawl he replied “they are for the wikia search web crawl, yes”.

Here is the image that Jimmy pointed the list to:

The Wikia team has announced the launch of their "un-official" blog. Wikia is "Building a new open global search engine." If you follow Wikia, and the evolution of search, this blog might be worth a visit/subscription.

Of course this news might be moot after Scoble declared that Mahalo will be the search leader in four years.

A brief discussion took place on the Wikia search mailing list that I thought might provide value to share.

John McCormac asked, "What exactly is Wikia? Is it a search engine or just a form of hybrid super directory based on Wikipedia and similar sites?"

Jeremie Berrebi provided the following response, "We are not building yet-another-search-engine, we are putting our efforts into making building ANY search engine easier, better tools, better methods, more shared systems, etc.  This isn't one project, it's tens or even hundreds of them, and likely to take years."

Check out our previous Wikia coverage.