Filed under: Web services, Social Software, Search, web 2.0
Wikia Search human powered search engine becomes useful
When Wales announced that he was working on a human powered search engine to compliment his human powered encyclopedia, we were skeptical but curious. When the public alpha launched earlier this year, we were disappointed. Up until this week, Wikia Search was basically just like any other search engine. A computer scanned the web for pages and decided which were the closest match to your search query. The only thing setting Wikia Search apart was the ability to create user profiles.
Now Wikia Search has added a slew of editing tools that could actually help improve (or utterly screw up) search results. Here's how it works. Wikia Search has a computer-created index of about 30 million sites. But you can edit any page. For example, when we searched for "download squad" this site came up as the second listing. We gave it a five star rating which moved it to the top of the page. And then for good measure, we hit the edit button and wrote a new site description. You can do this for any site. you can also add comments, annotations, or "spotlights," which highlights the entire entry so that it looks a bit like a sponsored result you would get from Google.
[via WebWare]
Another nice Wikia Search feature is the fact that you never have to hit a "next page" button. Just scroll to the bottom of your search results and Wikia Search will find a few more and lengthen your page. Since the search engine is not advertising-funded, there's no incentive to get you to click on additional pages.
Now let's take a moment to point out the obvious: You can edit your own search rankings! A lot of web publishers are going to be tempted to use this editing power to give their sites top rankings even when other web sites might be a better match.
If Wikia Search takes off the way that Wikipedia has, the community of editors should be able to automatically correct this by removing inaccurate edits. For example, while we felt it was entirely appropriate for Download Squad to get the top ranking for "download squad," we kind of hope someone would call us out for moving the site to the number one position for "Paris Hilton." But it's not at all clear at this point that anybody would.