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]
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
