Wikia Search, the human edited search engine which we trashed at launch, continues to make incremental improvements (and thankfully they’ve turned down the “This is a Google-killer” hype machine).
Today they did something really smart - they released a Firefox Add-on that lets users add search data without going back to the Wikia Search site itself. That lets casual users who want to contribute to the project to do so with less effort, meaning they may contribute far more data.
The toolbar also alters search results pages from Google and Yahoo (sorry, Microsoft, you didn’t make the cut) and adds a rating widget and an Add button next to each result. Again, this makes it super easy for Wikia Search users to improve the project’s data without actually visiting the site.
Overall Wikia Search is starting to look like a real search engine, with decent results for a lot of queries. They’ve made a lot of progress in the last few months.
“(and thankfully they’ve turned down the “This is a Google-killer” hype machine)…” so, is that why you’re not trashing them this time?
This is way better. lowering the entry, but it is really nothing to shout about.
Its definitely better, human-powered search really hasn’t proven itself, yet but they keep going forward. As Calacanis said, “[Wikia Search] is a lot of talk. They have a grub crawler. It’s nothing special really, it’s just crawling the Web. But, it has potential. Open-source projects have potential.” He then says that even Jimmy Wales would say their results are terrible. But Jason, what about Mahalo?
Is it even LEGAL to annotate Google search results? i mean u r modifying their search results to “loook different”.. is it allowed by Google/Yahoo terms of use?
Seriously, if this is allowed it opens a whole lot of new possibilities.
It’s not about if it’s ‘allowed’: it’s if it will be stopped or not. Client-side, baby.
Yeah the best this about wikia is that you can instantly add / edit sites. I love this feature.
So, Wikia wants to bypass engineering their own search tech by hijacking other companies’ results pages and having users tell them what’s valuable from those hijacked results? Thus Wikia becomes a “best of” site based on other companies’ results? Classy.
I don’t think they want to bypass engineering. They just want people to add relevant sites for a search result, use that as a baseline and then edit, rate, and annotate.
Yeah but using Google/Yahoo SERP’s to seed their database is pretty lame.
I think the important question here is, does the add-on send the actual ranking position and search keywords back to Wikia?
It’s one thing if the toolbar simply tells Wikia about a page you like. It’s quite another if Wikia also gets sent the terms you searched and what position the selected page(s) ranked within that search. That would be very, very evil.
Does anyone know more details about this?
I installed it. It seems to tel Wikia about a page you like and inserts it into the search term you searched for in google. Doesn’t seem very evil, actually seems quite clever.
Am I the only one that sees this for what it is - results scraping?
To Markus…it’s not lame seeding their database this way…I bet Google/Yahoo did similar stuff that was never public…
Got any evidence to back up that wild assertion?
I doubt other engines flat out steal results like this as it doesn’t seem to be very efficient in the face of massive algorithms (regardless of the legality aspect). However, I would be equally surprised if search engineers didn’t compare results between different engines on occasion. It’s quality assurance.
I want to believe in Wikia…I tried it and added some results. Its a cool concept…But for now I use Scour. Why? Because Scour has better results by mashing their results together from several engines….And even Scour I’m not using that much b/c it doesn’t remember my votes (visibly) the next time I search, it doesn’t remove sites I don’t like from my visible results, etc.
Sorry it doesn’t work for me. Wikia hasn’t really come up with a better query relevancy algorithm compared to google page rank.
So far, in the search space, other than page rank, there is no disruptive ranking algorithm/technology yet.
So, I am afraid that google will be around for a long time.