Wikia Search Gets Panned, Jimmy Wales Takes it in Stride
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ initial attempt to get into the search market is not impressing very many people in the tech community. As the early reviews flood in, one common thread in each of the reviews is that, at this point, it’s awful.
Wikia Search had hoped to combine social networking and user voting aspects to add a more human touch to the search process, somewhat like Mahalo, but as Stan Schroeder of Mashable puts it, “[Mahalo] simply blows Wikia Search away. Besides offering much better search results, and actually delivering on the “human” element of search, it has a lot more options, a better integrated social component, hell, it even looks better.”
Jimmy Wales and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington traded barbs on the TechCrunch comment board today regarding the supposed goal of Wikia Search. Wales had spoken at length about the weaknesses of Google in the past and Arrington pointed out how weak the alpha version of Wikia search compared to how Google looked when it started.
Wales responded, saying, “I told every single reporter I talked to that this is not a google killer at this point. Of course, you didn’t ask for an interview, so I understand that you didn’t know that.”
Yikes. From my perspective, those panning Wikia Search have some pretty valid points. It is not the least bit impressive, the results aren’t particularly relevant, and the short descriptions aren’t very revealing. The social aspects of it are pretty much non-existent at this point, and the idea you can vote on results isn’t unique.
But it is early, and as Wales noted, “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.”
Will search users want to deal with a search engine that “sucks” in an effort to help build it? That remains to be seen, and it will take time to tell, but the big reveal has fallen flat in the tech community and there’s not too much for Wales and company to hang their hats on at this point.
However, as Wales noted, Wikipedia didn’t start out as much and now, it’s at the top of the heap. Perhaps loyal Wikipedia users will flock to Wikia Search and build it into a monster.
Technorati Tags: google, jimmy wales, wikia serach, wikipedia
