Wikia Search is finally ready to play with. Jimmy Wales admits that up until now his company’s project to apply the wiki concept to search:
Pretty much sucked. It has not been usable on a day to day basis.
We agree. But today, Wikia Search is beginning to suck a lot less. It has only indexed 30 million Websites, but it is finally rolling out a set of editing features that lets searchers reorder, add, remove, rate, annotate, and comment on results. It also makes it easier for anyone to try to game the search results. Although, as with Wikipedia, an spammers can be banned by the community. We should see some fierce edit wars on this one.
The Ajax interface lets you drag results up or down the page. Hover the mouse over a result, and a menu appears on the right. You can edit the title or description, and spotlight the result with a yellow highlight.
Here is what the editing mode looks like for a search result:
If you don’t like any of the results you see, you can add your own by simply pasting in the URL.
Wikia Search also allows people to “annotate” results. If you click on “annotate,” it opens up a window with the actual Web page in question. Anything you click on or highlight will be added to the result. For instance, I added Michael’s Twitter photo to the Twitter result for “TechCrunch”:
I also added a comment: “Best way to keep up with Arrington.” If other searchers think those additions are helpful they can rate the result highly, if they think it is spam, they can delete the additions. Wales is relying on the community that grows up around Wikia Search to ban anyone trying to game the system. He is also relying on it to create the best search results. He says:
This is Day 1 for that really active community participation. In terms of what happens next, we will find out in the next couple weeks. How broad, how deep, how much activity.
And if searchers don’t like what they find on Wikia Search, handy Google and Yahoo icons make results from those search engines just a click away.
Here’s a video with Wales demonstrating the new features:
Just checked it out..the interface looks good…a lot better than what I expected…watch and wait to see it getting flooded with spam!!
You guys are becoming religions about services that launch late or poorly. Look at Hulu it was bashed at for days and nights by arrington but now they have a great service.
I just visited wikia and describing it as “sucks less” is entirely innaccurate. The site feels just like what you would expect with tons of customization and ease of use.
I fixed 5 complex search results in less than a minute. Maybe you guys should test out these updates from wikia before attempting to link a video.
But I guess reviewing is not really your job, its who reports it first that matters now adays unfortunately.
Does wikia search just automatically rank a wikipedia article as number 1?
I have a niche which I rank for #1 in all the SE’s and the closest wikipedia article on google is on page 5-6. Yet on wikia search a totally unrelated wikipedia article trumps my site.
On google that wikipedia article doesn’t even rank in the top 2k results. WTF? I know I can fix it, but why is the basic logic so flawed and why does it display how it spiders the page rather than using the meta description or any other 100x better means?
I just did a simple query. It was so slow so as to be unusable. Go sell awful to someone else cuz I’m not buying it. Eric, did you actually use the service? If so, you cannot conclude that it’s anything but awful. Sorry.
You know, I really like what I see from Wikia Search. I did a few test searches and absolutely loved this additional functionality. I’m not to thrilled with the results on a few searches in comparison to, say, Google, it’d definitely a unique and innovative way to search and highlight the very good results.
Who knows, maybe I’ll switch to Wikia Search one day. Those are some exciting features.
Wikia search + PredictAd = http://tinyurl.com/56xpp7
Community-powered autocomplete service on top of user-generated search engine — what else could you ask for?
Check out http://www.stumpedia.com. It’s truly a human-powered search engine and relies on human-indexing from start to finish. There are no automated bots or crawlers indexing pages.
Doesn’t work without enabling Javascript for wikia.com and isc.org. You won’t even get the search-box without enabling Javascript for wikia.com.
The endless scroll-down feature is neat though. But MSN Live Search did that first if I remember that correctly.
Also in Firefox it seems to preload ALL search-results. That means preloading the target links. That’s BAD! Not only puts that a lot of additional load on the target sites and screws up their statistics, it is also bad because of privacy issues. As it is now ALL target sites get to know my IP address and what I searched for without me even clicking on their links.
The results are so and so. Sometimes bad, sometimes good. I’m a little irritated though because I saw something like “waiting for search.yahoo.com” in the status bar of my browser while waiting for the results. Does this mean that the underlying search is no longer based on Nutch, but gets its result from Yahoo? Or was that just some weird coincidence because search.yahoo.com was one of the target sites that it was preloading? I can’t reproduce this now…
Pasan, @4, meet Rawaz, @2. Yes, I did try the service. It sucks less than before.
Actually, I quite like the interface. Still needs a lot of work and a lot more contributors. This is Day 1, as Wales says. His assessment now, is that the site is “usable.” I agree.
It’s a good start, after a false one in January. Let’s see where it goes from here.
I definitely agree the service has gotten better, but it still lacks some editing features. For example, I could not figure out how to delete annotations by other users. However, I believe this will all change with a little more work.
i dunno how long this wiki-mania will last
the last person who successfully created the wiki already cashed in..
i wonder how far will this go though
There seems to be no spam control!!!
What a fucking joke. The only people who will use this at all isn’t going to be for search, but to fuck around as a joke. People will be making their own “search pages” full of joke links and turning them into birthday cards for their friends.
No one is seriously going to use this for real search purposes. lol
It’s nearly impossible to verify which stuff is more important (links) than others….as it’s all opinion and not verifiable by any real facts.
I dunno, I think anything Wiki sucks. Just my two cents.
JJ
http://www.Privacy-Center.net
What a mess. Is this thing for real? Who were the idiot VCs who invested it in?
Time to write off this investment, guys.
Wales had one launch in January and blew it. You’d think he’d figure things out a lot better before launching another disaster today.
This guy’s a joke.
Their logo looks like it was inspired by belly button lint.
Nice improvements. Some trouble editing using EI.
Kind of puzzled why there is so much hatred or resentment in the comments above.
If you don’t like the page then just don’t visit it!
…what a wave of insightful comments…
Not that innovative. Actually I can´t see any magic why I should use it. Design soso, results seem not to do obvisously not arise from a more innovative algorithm.
Social adapted search engines do have a huge problem. They only refer to the, by the users already known websites.
Mike, the hatred and resentment comes from the overhyping and the fact that Jimmy Wales is a con man.
What software is he using to capture the demo?
“Pretty much sucked. It has not been usable on a day to day basis.”
http://valleywa...less-girlfriend
“jimbo.wales: right so the way it is told now, hang on a second
”
let’s actually do this right now
because the last thing I want to do is take a break from fVcking your brains out all night to work on your wikipedia entry
It looks like Jimi in his porn star lifestyle knows about sucking on a day to day basis.
If this search engine gets any type of traction whatsoever this thing is going to get spammed to death.
Spam is going to be a real problem. If they can replicate the spam police like they do on wikipedia you might be ok, but I dont see how they will achieve this.
its gonna get so much spam. they have to figure something out.
What’s the goal of wikia by building a search engine?
Is it just for wiki or something else too?
@23 Jimmy Wales should go back to SUCKING and banging his hot ass girlfriend Rachel Marsden. That’s all he’s good for.
Jimmy Wales Accused Of Expenses Rort: http://www.smh....4402516874.html
I found his search in the video stupid why not just do a search to get exactly what I want.
Local Movie Show times (zip code)
This returns several pages with local movie show times and it works on Google and half the other places.
Big James
i like the hot new featuires they really rock, go wikia,
this is a hot new set of features, but i don’t know if they will work
because of spammers and everything
I’m trying to figure out the logo
-atom bomb with a smiley face
-cloud with a closed eye smile
-ball of dust winking….
I called this TechCrunch/Wales Turnaround! http://techlead...o-tough-at.html
@27,
Jimmy started out doing a pr0n search engine right?
Apparently he never succeeded, and commissioned mediaWiki which was GPL’d and the wikipedia took off from there.
Why doesn’t Jimmy return to his roots instead of trying to scale his defeated search mountain of past days? It didn’t work with pr0n, what are the chances it’s going to work now with clean content?
Maybe Jimmy should just do pr0n0 ??
Not to be an @ss, I mean honestly.
Glad to hear that finally.
very cool. This has TONS of potential. Watch out GOOG.
Eviscerated by Valleywag.
“Jimmy Wales’ Estranged Wife Watches Over His Wikia Search Failure”
http://valleywa...s-wikia-failure
From looking at the recent changes (http://re.searc...com/recent.html) all the edits that are being made are anonymous users and they’re happening quite fast. For their search to have any chance of success, it’s going to need a large community of loyal users that is willing to combat spammers and thousands of anonymous users probably aren’t going to be that committed.
This redefines the workings of SEO. My question would be whether it has a similar tivo effect where based on your ratings, gradually the results will become more and more of what you want…
I like it and look forward to testing wikia more. Great work Mr. Wales!
Looks like there’s a good edit war on porn.
Hmmm…this seems to the google killer. A search engine is as good as the size of its index and its search algo.
Wikia’s search index is not as big as google,but it’s got killer interface. I can predict that, this time google will be playing copy cat …
Expect google to copy some of the stuff from wikia.
And this is just the start..wikia’s search results arent that great, but will definately improver over time, as there search index grows.
And as far as as spam is concerned….it’s not rocket science to fight spam….
Does spam prevent you from using your email ? orkut , facebook or myspace ??
You dont stop visiting those sites because of spam, then why should all community features be removed from wikia, just because of spam ??
All i can say is that, this will _definately_ give google a _tough_ competition.
GOOG — the most anti GOOD company of all time !
FINALLY! A search engine better than Google!
Congrats, Jimmy my boy. You did it.
Wikia search is amazing. I’m actually bursting with excitement over this, because it is so clearly the future of search.
Time to sit back and watch Google scramble. Wow. This is going to make waves.
@40 Are you on drugs? LMAO!
Looks like all of Wikia’s 3 employees are here on TechCrunch trying to polish up the Wikia turd.
I’m not a Wikia employee, I’m the owner of Entrecard.com, and let me tell you that Wikia is going to be absolutely huge.
I can just say that it’s what I’ve always wanted in a search engine and didn’t know I wanted.
I just think of Wikipedia for search, and by god they’ve pulled it off flawlessly this time.
@Chris Levant:
You can’t seriously think that Rachel Marsden is “hot”can you? She’s old as dirt, and the years haven’t been kind. There’s a reason her modeling shots are fuzzy: http://blatherw...l_marsden_2.jpg
Wikia Search may not suck but Jimmy Wales does!
@43 Dude ur blind? She’s only 33 according to the wikipedia article about her and she’s hot as hell, even in that pic with no makeup.
@42 Ur delusional.
@43 You’re the same michaellamb who stalks Marsden on Valleywag and posts about how “ugly” and “old” you think she is. Give it up, man. No one agrees with you except your sockpuppets.
Here we go again
ANY thread on ANY website about Wales ends up being about his hot girlfriend. Why? BECAUSE JIMBO WALES IS BORING!
And Wikia Search still sucks.
That is all.
PS Man is Jimbo Wales ever an ugly sumfabitch
http://www.flic...nge/2086757845/
Jesus. How does this retard get any girl at all?
@48, he has money. Most women in tech are gold diggers.
Gold diggers + gold = request filled.
They’ll just close their eyes and imagine it’s somebody else.
People might enjoy my column on the reasoning behind Wikia Search:
“When you have a Wikipedia, everything looks like an edit”
http://www.guar...a.searchengines
“But the idea that these simple systems can be applied to deep value-laden social problems, of politics, or even relevant search results, is like trying to use a hammer to turn screws on the basis that it works so well to hit nails.”