Well, the waiting appears to be over, and the promised 2007 launch date was technically achieved. Wikipedia/Wikia Founder Jimmy Wales has publicly announced the private beta for Wikia Search - right now. And the public launch is set for January 7. In a note to the Wikia Search email list a few minutes ago, he wrote:
From: jwales@xxxxx.com
Subject: [Search-l] private pre-alpha invites available
Date: December 23, 2007 7:04:01 PM PST
To: search-l@wikia.com
Reply-To: search-l@wikia.comPing me if you want one…. we’re launched.
I’m going to be letting people in slowly over the next few days and we
are aiming for a January 7th public launch. We want to run over the
system with help from people to complain about what is broken…Best way to ask is by email, but please don’t be offended if I don’t
answer right away. I am expecting a bit of a flood here.–Jimbo
_______________________________________________
Search-l mailing list
Search-l@wikia.com
http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/search-l
Change options or unsubscribe: http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/options/search-l
I spoke with Wikia CEO Gil Penchina on the the rules around the beta - users are being asked politely to withhold posting any information about the beta until the public launch on January 7. Hopefully people will respect that - there are bound to be some major hiccups and Wikia deserves a chance to iron those out before what is sure to be a ton of attention on the product.
That was a quick turnaround. They had pictures just the other day of all the new servers they’ve bought. I’m excited to see what they pull off.
Great can’t wait to try it out
I sure hope I get into the alpha test - I emailed Jimmy as soon as I saw the email come in from the mailing list.
FYI - it’s an alpha, not a beta - no idea what the real difference is!
#1 Nick - I wrote about that photo when it came out - they plugged those suckers in quick!
in all seriousness, they most likely are hooking up a batch at a time - for an alpha they might not need all 1,000 online immediately.
“users are being asked politely to withhold posting any information about the beta until the public launch on January 7. Hopefully people will respect that…”
Isn’t this blog post ignoring that request?
douglas - no. the email is public, anyone can join the list. They don’t want people talking about the actual product until the 7th.
I’ve been waiting to see this for a while now. For their sake I hope they can pull this off well…
“ai” cracked word in bible or di vinci code.
If you are muslim entrepenurer living dubai, shanghai, mumbai, and last letter ai countries. Stock Exchange will tell you. Your net worth is over than Google’s wealth & saudi’s oil prince. The government will pay everything for it. All You need the “ai” and Artifical intelligence search engine..
“ai” Muslims
“oo” Christians
“ia” Hakia or Wikia… you have be muslim to become next google. :/
Google & yahoo fear Muslim entrepenurer who starts company with letter “ai” search engine. He worth more than billion dollar.
“io” Atheist…forget it…
If you have western or christian ideology. you understand what’s coming in the bible. The search Crusades. :/
When you decipher in back of America’s dollar bill. You will see prymind. you can’t hardly see it.
“aa” tibet/ buddist monk. Billion
“oa” Hindu. Billion.
“ao” Jewish. Billion
“io” Atheist. Zero. That’s Edgeio. hahahah.
Not much content!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
ahhh…. thanks for clarifying.
ps, I didn’t mean any disrespect, I was just wondering.
thanks again.
Crusade?? That’s right - among Google, Yahoo and Wikia. No muslim. hindu, jews or christus - it’s the crusade of intelligence and smartness. That’s it guys
.
im really interested to see what they can pull off. Jimmy Wales is a great guy so i look forward to using this, i hope it will become better than Mahalo because IMHO its just not that great.
As Frank Lucas from American Gangster would say: My man
Two thumbs up for Jimmy
I really hope Jimbo pulls this one off successfully. Good luck.
wow…search is so cool…woohoo!
I like the ideology behind wikia search-”strong social and community focus”, let us see how nice it meet the objectives.
A better community -Meta Search engine is already out there in Beta and launches Monday with nice fanfare. It is called EarthFrisk.Org and is the world’s first Meta-Community Social Search engine which sports the best of results from Google, MSN and Yahoo, has less spam and then lets we the people vote on entries and comment. All of which adds to the new CV Rating System ( Color Value) that can be used to rate sites and people! Toolbars are also available for download in Firefox and IE and all of this will be perfected by Friday.
Only things missing so far are the simple ‘enter’ function rather than having to hit search, and also images and video are being made more Meta by Friday.
The rest is all functional and programmers and coders are rushing to be the first out there ( we already are!)
We not only have more abilities than Wiki’s upcoming search engine, but also have our own handy toolbar that people can use that in a very short time period can easily become more popular than the less democratic Pagerank system of Google. I will contacting Mike Arrington personally before the launch most likely on Friday!
I’m looking forward to it - we have been running the client since july - and crawled about 5,000,000 pages… so it would be nice to see the end result. It would also be nice if they fixed some of the bugs in the client and made it so you can add sites.
This is a great article that gives Google and Wikia a run for it…
Poll at Internet Evolution shows that the pollsters prefer Wikia search (in theory) over Google search.
I guess we’ll see soon enough if theory holds out!