Comments on: Wikia Search Goes Live: Not Great

By: Wikia Rumored To Cut 30% Of Workforce : VCsAndAngels - Venture Capital / VCs, Angel Investors, Startup News, Etc

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:17:31 +0000

[...] the beginning of this year, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales officially launched his attempt at a human-powered search engine, dubbed Wikia Search. TechCrunch was not impressed [...]

By: Wikia Rumored To Cut 30% Of Workforce

Wikia Rumored To Cut 30% Of Workforce — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:48:23 +0000

[...] the beginning of this year, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales officially launched his attempt at a human-powered search engine, dubbed Wikia Search. TechCrunch was not impressed [...]

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 14:34:19 +0000

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.

By: Hotel Paris Nord

Hotel Paris Nord — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:48:57 +0000

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).

By: Wiki-who?

Wiki-who? — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:29:21 +0000

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!

By: isedb.com

isedb.com — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:18:53 +0000

Wikia Search Goes Live: Not Great…

The long wait for Wikia Search is over with the alpha version of the service now live at alpha.search.wikia.com…

By: Engel Sanchez

Engel Sanchez — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:34:24 +0000

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.

By: Yako

Yako — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:15:26 +0000

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

By: GYUSZI BACSI

GYUSZI BACSI — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:39:33 +0000

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

By: Tomer Molovinsky

Tomer Molovinsky — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:23:21 +0000

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…

By: Arun

Arun — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 08:46:52 +0000

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

By: Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 08:31:23 +0000

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

By: WinAndFun.com

WinAndFun.com — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:59:54 +0000

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…

By: Sahar Sarid

Sahar Sarid — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:53:29 +0000

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

By: plop33

plop33 — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:45:07 +0000

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

By: Duncan Riley

Duncan Riley — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:42:30 +0000

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

By: plop33

plop33 — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:40:03 +0000

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

By: Dheeraj Sultanian

Dheeraj Sultanian — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:38:04 +0000

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!

By: Rm

Rm — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:36:10 +0000

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.

By: PAStheLoD

PAStheLoD — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:30:59 +0000

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

By: Jack Black

Jack Black — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:28:56 +0000

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

By: Duncan Riley

Duncan Riley — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:28:36 +0000

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

By: Rm

Rm — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:25:42 +0000

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

By: Duncan Riley

Duncan Riley — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:24:55 +0000

plop33
thanks for letting us know though.

By: PPC

PPC — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:23:12 +0000

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

adwords.google.com isn’t even listed…