Wikia Updates Wikia Search Allowing Anyone to Edit Anything - Spammers Welcome

Back in January, Wikia launched the Alpha version of Wikia Search. We said it "wasn't ready". Last month they made some major additions to the engine. Today they are rolling out the next Alpha version of the engine. I've embedded a video below that explains the updates. So far the company claims 20,000 users have registered, 25,000 mini-articles created, and 60,000 edits have been processed to-date.

I spoke with CEO Jimmy Wales who explained the updates to the alpha search engine. Wales noted that many of the new features are "wiki-like" and that you can now edit any search result as you see fit. Add, delete or update any link within a search result. You can also annotate, or preview, a URL in the search result. There's also the ability to highlight a site in the results if you feel it's worthy.

Here's the search result for CenterNetworks. Note the logos up in the header and rated pages. One interesting thing to try out -- scroll to the bottom of the page, watch how it adds more results on the fly with no pagination. I've never seen this before.

Here are all of the new features inside of the Wikia Search which allow anyone to customize the search results:

• The ability to edit any result, title and summary. The edits are then instantly available to everyone
• The ability to add new results for any search query instantly
• The ability to delete and/or hide any result
• Every result item can be rated 1-5 stars, which will slowly influence the ranking position
• The ability to add suggested and/or related searches for any query
• The ability to add public comments to any result item
• The opportunity to see site previews and annotate text, images, links and forms directly into the results
• The ability to try any search on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine with a single click
• The ability to customize the background on the header for a more themed result for any search
• The opportunity to view the change history showing all the social actions for any page

I asked Jimmy Wales about the spam that this engine will see. Why wouldn't I want to "own" every relevant query? And why wouldn't my competitors want to also own every relevant query? He suggested that he wasn't nearly as worried about spam as I am and that the community will monitor what's going on. He said, "I don't see spam as a big problem" when I asked why anyone wouldn't want to edit the records they are affected by.

There is a pretty active community forming around the Wikia Search engine. I am on all of the mailing lists and have watched some interesting discussions and debates pop up over the past few months. If you are building anything search related, you should be monitoring the Wikia Search developer groups as well.

In related news, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis last week also announced the ability to edit pages on the search-engine friendly content source. Mahalo claims that any edits that are made by a user will be reviewed by one of Jason's Mahaloians. The changes go live immediately and the review will come later on. This is a different than the above updates from Wikia as Wikia isn't reviewing the changes, they are leaving it to the overall community to monitor.

The real question is whether people will want to edit for-profit sites for free while helping the CEOs generate more revenue that isn't returned to the user. Will users want to edit Wikia Search/Mahalo the same way they edit Wikipedia? I've said for a while now that Jason would open Mahalo up because the more he can get done for free, the more likely Mahalo is to turn a profit. While Jason has claimed that Mahalo will have several thousand full-time paid editors over the next few years, my guess is that more features will open to the public first. Makes sense right -- why pay outsiders when Jason/Jimmy's fans will do it for free?