January 6, 2008

Wikia Search Goes Live: Not Great

Duncan Riley

27 comments »

The long wait for Wikia Search is over with the alpha version of the service now live.

As we wrote December 23, Wikia’s Jimmy Wales is pitching the search engine as a Google competitor; its a strong statement to make but does Wikia Search Alpha take the good fight up to Google? Not yet.

I ran a couple of different search terms into Wikia with mixed results. A search for TechCrunch for example shows TechCrunch.com as the first result, but type in Michael Arrington and the only TechCrunch result is at 7, and it’s TechCrunch France aside from something called a “mini-article”. I tried a couple of other people in Wikia Search as well, the service has no issues with finding sites/ companies by name, but really struggles when you’re searching for people.

The user interface is clean and uncluttered, but the choice of font colors has a lot to be desired.

Ultimately you can judge for yourself at alpha.search.wikia.com

Update: as pointed out in the comments, Wikia Search also doesn’t suggest results based on incorrect spellings, for example Wikiq doesn’t recommend Wikia, either in the results itself or with a “did you mean Wikia” line as Google would do.

Update 2: see Michael’s thoughts here.

Wikia

Loading information about Wikia…

Sphere It

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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isedb.com

January 7th, 2008 at 5:18 pm

Comments

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ChrisW

January 6th, 2008 at 10:05 pm

Does anybody really use anything other than Google these days?
Blur

January 6th, 2008 at 10:06 pm

Of course Duncan always the tool. Look what he’s searching. Why of course his boss.
plop33

January 6th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

shame wikipedia is also going south by starting to follow in DMOZs footsteps which killed that off.
plop33

January 6th, 2008 at 10:22 pm

OK so the biggest failure you did not spot Duncan is that a search with a spelling error leaves you cold. This is what made google google. their traffic doubled when they implemented ‘do you mean this’

http://re.search.wikia.com/search#parasiteees
PPC

January 6th, 2008 at 10:23 pm

I won’t abandoning Google anytime soon, just try searching for “adwords”

adwords.google.com isn’t even listed…
Duncan Riley

January 6th, 2008 at 10:24 pm

plop33
thanks for letting us know though.
Rm

January 6th, 2008 at 10:25 pm

Well, check out our site, Techcrunch wont put a post on us, maybe cause were not funded, im not sure why haha lol

TallStreet.com
Duncan Riley

January 6th, 2008 at 10:28 pm

Rm,
nothing to do with you not having funding, everything to do with your product offering worse search results than Wikia.
Jack Black

January 6th, 2008 at 10:28 pm

no good on ambiguous search terms, try search for “30 rock” and “the office”, the results is far from what Google and Yahoo gives.
PAStheLoD

January 6th, 2008 at 10:30 pm

The idea has potential, but as a Google “extension” made/developed by Google itself. This will always “lag” behind Google. No editors are as fast as the bots
Rm

January 6th, 2008 at 10:36 pm

Good things take time, im not saying were going to get it right but it will take time for this new adoption. You guys do tell it how it is and you guys are correct in these posts, but very quick to judge Wikia Search.
Dheeraj Sultanian

January 6th, 2008 at 10:38 pm

I’m actually really impressed with the results given they have not indexed much of the web, and the human element has not proliferated. Most of the informational searches on Google lead to Wikipedia - wikia will naturally lead to the best information given time. Also, since it is open - nobody controls the web - its win/win people!
plop33

January 6th, 2008 at 10:40 pm

duncan you beat MA to it by a few minutes, haha. Its just a shame wordpress didnt spot his post as duplicate content, and spit out ‘you have already said that!’ lol
Duncan Riley

January 6th, 2008 at 10:42 pm

More than a few minutes plop33
Michael has a different take anyway. More the merrier on something like this .
plop33

January 6th, 2008 at 10:45 pm

oh tall-street

I was going to give you a plug because it’s quite true TC fails to give reviews to little guys unless they have really fat guys behind them.

but i just checked out
tallstreet.com/
and it’s tripe mate, you cannot get people to log in for search, blimmy the only ones registering for services these days are spam bots. lol
Sahar Sarid

January 6th, 2008 at 10:53 pm

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
WinAndFun.com

January 6th, 2008 at 10:59 pm

I try to search some sites in Greek but the search dosen’t support Greek…
I hope it will soon…

Also I try to search some smaller sites (english) with they site name, but no results either… Let’s hope soon their spider will index them…
Robin Wauters

January 7th, 2008 at 12:31 am

I bet you would be unimpressed with the alpha version of Wikipedia too if it would launch today. Give it time!
Arun

January 7th, 2008 at 12:46 am

Good things doesn’t happen quite often and instantly. Give it time.
Tomer Molovinsky

January 7th, 2008 at 1:23 am

If Wikia really wants to make this a community-generated search engine than the demo attached will do just that - http://tinyurl.com/yvah8w

PredictAd Search Assist has a collaborative filtering feature that learns community search patterns. If you start typing in the demo attached you will start getting autocomplete results (with contextual advertisements) - these results will optimize based on the popularity of certain search terms/phrases.

If Jimmy Wales is reading - take a close look…PredictAd is FREE and its contextual advertising platform gives the publisher something that Adwords simply doesn’t! Moreover, it’s the first Ajax service offered on the web, and it’s a cool one at that…
GYUSZI BACSI

January 7th, 2008 at 2:39 am

I think to be a real google competitor they have to dress very very warm (:
Yako

January 7th, 2008 at 4:15 am

Not grate? I’m sorry but that sucks. I really think there can be a competition to Google… but its not this one.
Engel Sanchez

January 7th, 2008 at 9:34 am

Duncan, you have to note that Wikia Search is a people power thing, I mean today is the official public launch, so starting today people will start to contribute to make Wikia better. You cannot thing that anyone from day one will be a Google.
Wiki-who?

January 7th, 2008 at 11:29 pm

I think Gil Penchina and Jimmy Wales should fire their engineers and go build a great search engine by using - what else - Google technology called Custom Search Engine and plonk it on wikia.com and wikipedia.com. These monkeys dont know what a search engine is let alone build one. Idiots!
Hotel Paris Nord

January 8th, 2008 at 1:48 am

One of the most successful internet entrepreneur who told us that he’s going to revolutionize the search engines tools but when we see the alpha version, please it’s just a joke. Lots of current services do much much better. But I’ll give him some time (a year).
Ben

January 8th, 2008 at 6:34 am

My standard test for a new search engine is “ham” as it is interesting to see how it handles the ambiguity of ham radio (niche subject but with plentiful coverage on the internet) versus the meat versus ham acting.

Wikia’s top search result for “ham” is a German language page about “Fahrschulen in Hamm in Westfalen” (not sure what it’s actually about). Everything else is about ham radio, apart from a page on Hamburg airport (!) and the Ham Chinese consulate (?).

It seems like their algorithm is pretty poor if it returns pages which don’t even mention “ham” once (apart from as part of a word) on the first page.