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Wikia Search Goes Live – It’s Not Ready Yet
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
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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
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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.
Well done Jimmy – you have come along way and developed a product that has a lot of potential. However, you are obviously in the same space as Google – who pretty much get things right – or at least returns search results that ‘feel right’ – on almost every search. Therefore competition will be tough.
Launching a product before ‘it is perfect’ is indeed the best approach, you’ll get the valuable public feedback and comments which can be implemented sooner than later.
“Instead of reloading the page to see the next batch of results, the page just expands on the click to show the next batch” – a nice feature, but i do believe both Microsoft and Amazon’s A9 search services had this feature 12 months ago. Glad to see you’re using it too.
Good luck, you will need it (and a lot of patience).
“I would have liked it to be a bit more polished before hitting the public eye.” Yes, us too, in a way, but that really isn’t the world we come from. “Release early, release often” is my philosophy.
Here’s something I have been telling people for a year: when I launched Wikipedia, it was empty. Not much of an encyclopedia. And in fact, my first attempt to build a freely licensed encyclopedia (Nupedia) failed completely. But one of the things Nupedia did for us as a community was give us a couple of years to talk about how to do what we wanted to do.
So, I am just following the same process here. Open source. This is how you do it. (Ever try a pre-1.0 Linux kernel? Awful!)
The difference is, of course, now everyone watches with great expectations everything I do. :)
Well, in a couple of weeks the noise will die down, and then we can just keep our noses to the ground trying to build this thing.
google is getting way too commercial… just bypass the first page is what i usually do…
open source, lots of cross-pollination…. everybody talking to everybody, hive mind search…. just might be the search engine of choice in the near future
enjoy
I couldn’t agree more with your comments. As a VP of technology for a small company, I play a lot of roles, and I laughed when I read your comments about noise dying, and your team continuing to build the product. I can’t even count how many times in the real world, expectations are raised because of a huge home run project (that nobody remembers how much work it was to build, because all eyes weren’t on), and people shocked when the first version of the next project is so bad. I empathize with you completely, because what made the last product so good was the approach of sending the software out for the world to use.
So what do you do when all eyes are on you now? Change the approach and test the software like mad? Certain things you just can’t test for, you need the product out there! I have on occasion caved and not released because I knew people would complain, but in reality, I should have just released!
I truly respect you for the approach you took on this, even when all eyes were on you. You are 100% correct, a few months/years from now, your new venture will be all over the media and magazines, and nobody will remember the amount of work it took to get you there. So to that end, Fantastic release!
I think Jimmy Wales does care – he responded to several people with rather self deprecating remarks.
Here and at TechCrunch Wales has made the case that he acknowledged Search Wikia would be bad at launch. However, his past grandiose statements about fixing search, coupled with his outsize Wikipedia reputation, guaranteed the response that the project is getting today. Unlike Wikipedia, this one’s not starting in the dark, and many people are going to go on first impressions exactly because of the hype and because of Wales’ reputation.
Maybe Wales just doesn’t care what people say. But for most people starting a hyped Web site that is guaranteed to get massive eyeballs at its first public unveiling, offering something with more meat on the bones would’ve been the way to go.
Wow — do people actually believe that stuff? You’ll need strong AI for any of it to be possible, and if that happens the upheavals will be much bigger than any of things you’re talking about.
yeah. I have to say it didn’t wow me either.
I posted my thoughts here:
http://feedblog.org/2008/01/06/on-wikia/
This is coming from my own agenda, so it may seem OT.
We are still in a kind of “candy era” era of the web. The success-stories of the past 15 years have mainly been about creating virtual libaries (Amazon book search, blogs, digg), galleries (flickr), phone books (myspace, facebook), media stores (napster, audiogalaxy, piratebay), trading posts (ebay, craigslist). All that stuff is pretty cool but…
The “semantic web” has more potential to change the world. Once we have widely adopted standards for “a system of meaning” we will really start seeing changes. In other words, once there is a way to compare the meaning of documents we will be able to do things like:
- have 1000+ year conversations that NEVER rehash old opinions (pretty much impossible now, since you can’t exactly review the past 1000 years of a discussion thread)
- be able to find answers for your questions… and restrict results to match a belief set (eg: ask a question on stem cells and specify that you want to exclude “christian science” in the results)
- limit duplication of effort when you post your research (even if your research is something as “trivial” as Britney Spears’ fashion sense) by searching for articles that have the same “meaning” as your own
It seems to me that Jimmy Wale’s search effort is better suited to this kind of web, since it allows for public search algorithms. I have high hopes for the future.
If Wikia really wants to make this a community-generated search engine than the demo attached will do just that – http://tinyurl.com/yvah8w
PredictAd Search Assist has a collaborative filtering feature that learns community search patterns. If you start typing in the demo attached you will start getting autocomplete results (with contextual advertisements) – these results will optimize based on the popularity of certain search terms/phrases.
If Jimmy Wales is reading – take a close look…PredictAd is FREE and its contextual advertising platform gives the publisher something that Adwords simply doesn’t! Moreover, it’s the first Ajax service offered on the web, and it’s a cool one at that…