Many of us have waited a year as the Jimmy Wales hype machine promised a human powered search engine that could take on Google. Tonight that search engine launched at alpha.search.wikia.com, and it may be one of the biggest disappointments I’ve had the displeasure of reviewing.
First of all, it’s barely a search engine at all. It’s based on the open source Nutch software and contains an index of web pages created by Grub (a company Wikia acquired last year). The search results are poor and thin, as would be expected if not for the huge expectations that have been set. Absolutely no one is going to use this to search the web, until (and if) it is greatly improved.
But beyond the poor search results, there is really no “human” element to the engine at all. That functionality will come later, says Wikia CEO Gil Penchina. For now, users can add keywords to their profile – things that they are interested in, etc. When a search is conducted by others on those terms, the user’s picture is shown in the right hand column. Eventually, users will be able to edit and improve results for searches they are interested in. But currently, all users can do is add keywords to their profile that they might someday be interested in, and/or contribute to a “mini-article” that appears at the top of search results for queries (example).
And about those profiles. As anticipated, Wikia Search is yet another social network. User profiles include basic elements like a photo, adding friends, and information about interests and skills. And in a direct rip off of Facebook, Wikia Search profiles contain an activity stream of stuff you and your friends have been up to over the recent past.
Wikia search would be a disappointment even without the massive hype we’ve had to endure. And taking that hype into account, this product is an inexcusable waste of time.
To be fair, CEO Gil Penchina warned me it wouldn’t be a great product at launch. It’s simply a proof of concept of what can be created using open source software and little money, he says. Fair enough. But it’s time for Wales to be quiet, let this thing evolve or not, and eventually let the software do the talking. Eventually Wikia will make the index available to third parties. But the index needs to be reasonably decent before anyone will want it. Wikia has a long way to go to get there.
Update: Good debate in the comments below, including a couple from Jimmy Wales.
Ahhhh
Mr. Mikey Arrington lol, always such a bad review. I just don,t know why and how you can come up with such a quick decision, good things take time, even when Google started it wasn’t the best and still isn’t.
TallStreet.com
I’ve been testing it for four days. And actually Google was pretty kick ass the day it launched.
again as with duncan’s post you MA have not spotted the biggest flaw. that it has no capacity to offer suggestions of bad spellings. thats what made googles traffic double over night and what made google google.
But beyond the poor search results, there is really no “human” element to the engine at all. That functionality will come later, says Wikia CEO Gil Penchina
Here’s my review:
http://www.cent...earch-goes-live
I basically completely agree with Mike and #1 – I don’t know about Mike but I’ve been using the alpha since the beginning so I can give you input from actual use. They should have kept it under lock and key for a bit longer to polish it first.
Aaah good thing they have alot of servers as you reported last week. They will need them for a day.
They should merge with powerset since they have so many synergies – great PR but jacks*** for real technology.
I know the results can not be well reviewed within 4 days. Especially something that takes a large user base in order to get it going. It could be a year until you start to see good results. I know it may look bad now, but whoever gets it rolling, will far pass any results that Google can obtain.
#6 – from what i’ve seen, you are way off.
the switching costs are too high – both mahalo and hakia have tried something different
all this is, just a search engine and a friends page at this point.
As anticipated, Wikia Search is yet another social network. User profiles include basic elements like a photo, adding friends, and information about interests and skills
I’m strongly agreed with u. The search result suck.
It sounds like it’s ‘alpha’ in the traditional sense. As in working toward getting to ‘beta’. To do that, they need to talk, and they need to get people that power the project to support it early, before it’s ready, so there is a critical mass of some sort ready to go.
“This product is an inexcusable waste of time.”
Inexcusable?
“CEO Gil Penchina warned me it wouldn’t be a great product at launch.”
Oh, next sentence, there is the excuse. And is this alpha actually considered launch?
“It’s time for Wales to be quiet, let this thing evolve or not, and eventually let the software do the talking.”
That just sounds ridiculous– shut up and let the eventually human-powered search evolve without anybody being told about it, and let the software speak for itself, but complain it’s not human-powered yet. I just don’t see what path of development for this particular product you are advocating. Attract people with your silence?
A great way of ‘enduring’ hype is to ignore it. There’s a large Internet out there that doesn’t issue press releases at every moment, they might be interesting to hear about too.
Grub and Nutch aren’t necessarily at fault here.
Even if they uses Spinn3r…
http://spinn3r.com
… while they wouldn’t have spam, they would have a ranking problem.
Even if you have ALL ham you’re going to have to re-rank it.
The solution to search isn’t humans. It’s not all algorithmic either. It would be REALLY nice to see a hybrid.
Unfortunately, the only company really capable of doing this now is Google.
To be fair, CEO Gil Penchina warned me it wouldn’t be a great product at launch. It’s simply a proof of concept of what can be created using open source software and little money, he says. Fair enough. But it’s time for Wales to be quiet, let this thing evolve or not, and eventually let the software do the talking. Eventually Wikia will make the index available to third parties. But the index needs to be reasonably decent before anyone will want it. Wikia has a long way to go to get there.
# 7
From what you have seen?! Anything like this is way too early to tell. Even Google doesn’t have it completely down. There is alot of room for growth here, the results in google and any type of search are easily gamed.
Google is the best for now, but anyone with the money or knowledge can get in whatever search results they need.
Release early, release often.
It’s a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine. We’ve been telling everyone that constantly. I’m sorry Michael’s disappointed, but having said that, we didn’t build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases.
When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!
So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.
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.
Ok UI, but the search results are pretty marginal..
For those who have been following the rise of Wikipedia – the much hyped Social Search Engine is now live in Alpha Test.
Jimmy – perhaps you can comment on my review – my concerns are a bit different than Mike’s:
http://www.cent...earch-goes-live
Maybe we will have more time to speak this week – we only had 4 minutes on Friday. Would be interested in discussing further.
After spending millions and three years in development we released our question search engine (ASSISTA) to the world. it is understandable with a major release of an ambitious search engines that results are mixed, things don’t yet work as they could, should.
What many don’t know is search is extremely expensive. Google, Yahoo,MSN has made the entry level to the search game close to impossible. Users expectations in terms of speed alone is something that is close to impossible to duplicate across large data sets, and we’re not even talking yet about relevancy, technology.
As I’m sure Wales and Co. are looking at it, the true measure of their work will be at least in a year or two from now, not today.
Cheers
Sahar
Good said Jimmy. Wikipedia took time, Google took time and so will Wikia take time.
My thoughts are here:
http://feedblog...01/06/on-wikia/
Give the site a chance. Agreed it has a long way to go. I reserve judgment for another few months yet.
First of all, it’s barely a search engine at all. It’s based on the open source Nutch software and contains an index of web pages created by Grub (a company Wikia acquired last year)
Jimmy – to be fair, it’s been you from the start that talked about beating Google:
“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”
And the real problem here isn’t that the search sucks. That’s beside the point. It’s that you haven’t launched any of the tools that can allow humans to make it better. Until you do, the engine can’t get any better than it is now.
Who needs another social network, seriously. Everyone is trying to ride the wave of the next Facebook. Few can do this and I’m not sure if were ready for it.
Agreed. The search results suck on this and I don’t see any path to improving it (or is it gaming it?).
Michael,
I am normally very fond of your reviews, and trusting of your opinion, but I feel you have some kind of a chip on your shoulder in this instance. I can recall Wales talking about how, when he launched Wikipedia, that he had to personally doctor up articles himself to make content. I expect that this new search engine will be no different.
I also feel you’ve been spoiled by the ‘new and improved’ meanings for “alpha” and “beta”. Once upon a time, anything labeled “alpha” would have almost certainly not been seen as something that should even be seriously reviewed, let alone used. Forgive if I find it a little hilarious that you have somehow managed to have the gall to give an alpha (I mean.. the URL has ‘alpha’ in it) product such a harsh review.
In anything that involves a community approach, the alpha will be improved upon by dedicated individuals who want to see the technology go the distance. As is the case with any other ‘open’ technology, the community will improve it, make it more reliable, and polish it off in ways that corporations like Google wish they could effectively harness.
I suspect that, after the community has been given time to manipulate the results, you’ll be wishing to retract this harsh review.
Adam – No chip on my shoulder. The problem is that there was just this incredible amount of hype around this, driven entirely by Wales. And the natural brand association between wikipedia and wikia gave the project more weight as well, which Wales did nothing to mitigate. You can’t talk about killing Google for a year, launch a really poor product and then be upset by negative reviews. The bed was made.
I just tried it and I am afraid it is not very. I tried some basic searches and it could not find much. I hope they improve fast and I wish the the best of luck. But I am not going to abandon Google just yet.
Michael,
I think a lot of the issue here is perception. I’m sure from where you’re sitting you get to see a lot of very, very flashy products made by corporations with deadlines to meet and so on.
In any ‘open’ design the community responsible for the production of the product has no deadlines, the technology evolves at it’s own pace and over time surpasses it’s competitors. Yes, right now, Wikia Search is of poor quality but once the tools are made available to the users to start adding content, and manipulating the content, I highly suspect it will become an incredibly reliable site.
I’ll just say it again, it’s alpha. I think we all have a right to be disappointed by the lack of ability to contribute to the search engine yet. That’s a feature I would have expected to be present even in an alpha state, since the entire concept of the engine is to be manipulated and edited by the community. In that respect, I certainly share in your disappointment.
I will certainly be watching this site, and I hope you’ll do the same. A year, or two years, from now you might be looking back at this initial review with your palm pressed firmly against your forehead, wondering: “What on earth was I thinking?”
Give it time.
Adam – you seem to think that once I write something, I’m unable to change my mind later on. If the engine turns into something interesting I’ll cover it honestly.
Early on in Ning’s lifecycle I trashed them. Later, I retracted.
http://www.tech...01/20/ning-rip/
http://www.tech...6/ning-in-full/
I believe Wikia made a strategic error in over hyping this product, and promising it by end of 2007. That promise has almost certainly led them to release a product waaaay before it should see the light of day. And since I believe that, i wrote it.
Huh! Performing a search on ‘microsoft’ returns results to everything but Microsoft’s home page. In the first 40 results there are links to the IE home page, windows update, their French and UK based web sites but none to their corporate home page (microsoft.com). Pathetic.
I was also unable to get results to my own corporate web site even though I entered “March Digital Sydney Australia” …. what a waste if time and effort.
the problem with search, is that in order to take on Google you need a perfect product. No alpha, no beta, you need something that works perfectly from day 1, something that can give search results from the whole internet, something that indexes pages faster, and most of all something that gives relevant search results.
It will be very interesting to see how Mr. Wales will market this new search engine. All the best!
I think Wikia did the same thing most open source communities tend to do when releasing a product. They built interest in the community, and got a lot of press while doing it. Why would they do that? They want contributors to help get the technology off the ground.
What doesn’t make sense was the decision to release before making the tools to manipulate the data available. In that respect, again, I’m confused and disappointed by this. I disagree that this product is not ready to see the light of day though, I think the earlier they “release” the site and get the ball rolling on getting the results more reliable, the better.
If anything, I would say it’s far too early to give it any kind of a review. You wouldn’t take a completely alpha Ubuntu release and review it as a full point release, would you? Nor would you take an early development build of Windows and bash it as a though it were a final product.
If Firefox were to release an alpha of FireFox 4 right this moment, proclaiming that it would compete with Internet Explorer or Safari head on, would you post such a harsh review? I really don’t think that you would. Alpha technology is alpha technology, most alphas are barely usable anyway.
My only issue with this ‘release’ is the fact that the core functionality of the engine was completely left out.
Actually, Michael, 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.
I have been trying pretty hard to DAMPEN the hype because I knew people like you would beat me up. Well, here it is, you beat me up. My prediction is right.
But that’s ok. It was expected.
Gah, 2:54 AM is not good for my typing. I meant to say:
“If Mozilla were to release an alpha of FireFox 4 right this moment, proclaiming that it would compete with Internet Explorer or Safari head on, would you post such a harsh review?”
It’s just the PR game. Just like Google hyped up OpenSocial as the Facebook killer and released a piece of crap. Wales got Wikia talked about and you wrote an article that’s getting a bunch of comments, including by Wales himself, so everybody’s happy. Given the success of Wikipedia I have no doubt that Wikia will be successful as well. Then you’ll write another article to retract yourself
Geez, the whole industry is poisoned by the agile crap, release early, release often, which works with web UI but complex solution like web search. In order to compete search at web scale, you need competitive search infrastructure at web scale first. Futzing/churning around with crappy tools that’re gonna be thrown away is completely waste of time.
Surprising to see that no one notice a subtle feature of Wikia . they are making an index of web and will be opening it to every developer in world . you wnat to use this index as a feeder to your next “Page Rank” go ahead do it . you want to do a semantic or natural language search . you have a vast index of web at your disposal .
effectively it weakens the infrastructure advantage of google to a large extent
now you too can have Google if you have an innovative algo .capital expense to make an infrastructure will not be an excuse .
this is what wikia is , sorry Mike i guess you missed it here
Hey, I tried it out and although the first search on my real name came up with something related to .. BarCampBlock Needs VC-Supplied Beer (ok, I did register but did not make it to BarCampBlock- maybe I would have gone if there was VC supplied beer)… I then created a mini-article which now appears on my name. And that is very cool..
We need to give Wikia time – they did say it was just a “proof of concept”. This is the technology of the future – and deserves more time and reviews that reflect it’s “alpha” status. This is also community driven engine- so won’t it get better as more of the community starts using it?
Jimmy – I did ask Gil, who’s the CEO of the company, for an interview, and was able to snatch a couple of minutes from him over the weekend (thus my comments from him in the post). It’s good that you have been trying to dampen the hype, but it’s important to remember that it was you who created the hype in the first place.
Anyway, I’m sure you guys will be heads down in creating the new functionality, and I look forward to seeing it. We’ve generally been pro-wikia. Hopefully we’ll get back to that trend eventually.
And an aside – Gil is actually a good friend as well, and he’s clearly going to be a little pissed about this post. My guess is he starts talking to me again mid-2008.
Prashant, yes, they will make the index available to third parties, which is great. But first the index needs to be worthwile. They must build a reasonably good search engine first, and to prove out the concept they need to focus on the human tools to make the index better.
We love you too, Michael.
It’s a dramatic review, but an honest review. The search results are just being pulled from a placeholder index, so they suck. The social tools are being rolled out as we finish them. It’ll shape up, and hopefully eventually it won’t suck.
I haven’t tried Wikia yet, so won’t judge it, bit in general search has to be algorithmic first, and a human layer can be added on later, but not via a social network, but via the layer of trust that Jon Udell talks about. The only thing that comes close to that today is Lijit, but as Kevin mentioned earlier, to really bring that idea to fruition, only Google really has the scale and capability.
“openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases….”
wikipedia’s postings are open, transparent and allow participation [outside its core of editors]? that’s pretty funny….
Let’s hope Leonard from 1938 Media gives a kind review…
Comparing it to Google would be far too brutal and unjustified as of now, but it surely introduces some interesting elements to the mix, and it’s obvious that it will take time, data and experimentation till Wikia figures out what are the right mix for a next-gen search.
But I wonder, beyond the web/tech savvy of us, how useful a search engine with a tutorial could be for the common web audience?
The results for keywords I know look like crap…
http://re.searc...h#web%20hosting
on page 1 you have bravenet and lunarpages listed twice.
It appears that the blackhat SEO tricks that google cleans up is working well in the Wikia search.
My opinion today is 2 thumbs down. Look forward to seeing them get better though.
How are results for keywords you track?
Wales said – The engine at launch would ‘SUCK’. So there you go. What better review do you want?
he said it would ‘SUCK’ and you review it to say the same.
Not smart Mike. Not smart at all.
Time can prove everything~
IMHO, today, only large players (MS, Y!, Ask…) have a chance to go head to head with Google. Don’t make me believe “tiny” entrants could change the market rules. Costly advanced infrastructures and name recognition are ruling the market for “usual users”.
The “search” results aren’t bad today from most of them and the incremental benefit to improve accuracy isn’t proven right now.
For me, the future is in “how to display results” and how to manipulate/digg (in) relevant results. Google offers basic “2 text lines” with “some displayed strings” on page results… what a poor food to please users (it looks MS-DOS display) ! The user experience is poor (clicking text lines and going back to Google pages… what a change since years !!)… ok for mobile searches but for “desktop searches”… nope !!!
If user base switches it will be on superior displayed/visualized results (relevancies/accuracies, 3D doc manipulations, personal filters,…) to drastically improve the way to get the “right document(s)”.
The first war was to get user being happy with quick display results (served à la “Fast Food”) but the “Meal” is not digested yet. Now the battle field must be on “helping users to quickly manipulate/digg displayed results”… to keep “Fast Food”… hot and make users salivate to make again and again!
I bet you would be unimpressed with the alpha version of Wikipedia too if it would launch today. Give it time!
Re-reading old interviews with Wales, I don’t feel like he has been busy creating a big pre-launch hype, rather than just trying to explain what he ultimately wants Wikia Search to be.
Jimmy & Co.:
I’m a member of the Lucene dev team and as such keep track of Nutch as well. One thing that I’ve been waiting for is the appearance of someone, anyone, from Wikia on either the nutch-user or the nutch-dev mailing list. Up until now, I have not spotted anyone from Wikia there. No questions, no answers, no improvement suggestions, no improvement contributions from any Wikia developers… how come?
If you are relying on Nutch, shouldn’t your developers be digging through Nutch source code, ripping it apart, finding, reporting, and fixing bugs, improving performance, adding functionality, etc.? Otherwise, aren’t you really just using Nutch out of the box, the same way that anyone else with enough $$$ to buy hardware and pay for the bandwidth could do? As far as I can tell, the functionality built so far on Wikia Search is pretty basic, so there is not a lot of added value there, I think.
No?
I do agree with the attitude and approach in your comments above. Planet earth is still spinning, even if the alpha release is not very good.
Where oh where to begin…
First, it’s interesting to note that Wales still feels a need to slip in the line “When I launched Wikipedia…” because many dispute his interpretation of the beginnings of that endeavor.
Second, look at the quality of Wikipedia itself as a guide to Wikia’s outcome. Wikipedia is a collection of articles, with little consistency or standards. Universities have begun explicitly disallowing its use as a reference source. Here’s a helpful forum describing some of the problems with Wikipedia: http://www.wiki...ediareview.com/ Interestingly, beware the future of Wikipedia if Google ever decides to alter its page position. Hmm, I wonder how THIS will affect things? http://googlebl...contribute.html
Third, now that Wales has set his sights on cashing-in, beware of plenty more hype and spin control. A useful product would be a nice start. Substance trumps talk. The truth always comes-out and the cream always rises (eventually). It’ll be interesting to watch and see if he can pull something off. I’m certainly glad that I’m not an investor.