Jimmy Wales is opening up the Wikia Search engine to anyone who wants their own data or application to show up in results. Called Wikia Intelligent Search Extensions (WISE), it lets developers create search results based on certain keywords or rules. Wales tells me:
It is like Facebook Apps for search results.
Wikia Search is launching the WISE framework with a bunch of partners: Digg (returns recent frontpage headlines as results), Indeed (for job search), Kayak (for travel searches), Last.fm (for music searches), and even Twitter (relevant Tweets). The other partners at launch will be AccuEather, AcronymFinder, Amie Street, Creative Commons (CC images), PleaseDressMe (T-shirt results) Thomson Reuters, Snooth (wine), and Yelp (local reviews). Partners can customize results not just for keywords, but create their own search apps. (Kayak’s, for instance, let’s you enter departing and returning dates when you search for a flight). So like Yahoo BOSS and Search Monkey, WISE lets developers change both the result ranking and the look and feel of customized results. In fact, anything that can be written in HTML can turn up as a result.
Already, regular users can help improve results on Wikia Search by voting individual results up or down, adding in their own links, or submitting “good” sites to Wikia’s index via a Firefox add-on. But now with the WISE API, Wikia Search is tapping into professional developers as well. In this way, Wikia Search is hoping to make its search engine better by relyingon the work of others. Says Wales:
One of the things we are interested in is vertical searches with a good API and sensible results (otherwise the community will give it a thumbs down). Hopefully, it will drive some traffic to them and make our search results better.
And what about gaming the system? Isn’t this just a free way to get sponsored search results? To prevent that sort of thing, each new app will be manually approved before it is rolled out. Wales criteria is that he will approve them as long as “they are not awful.” (Everyone else gets to test their apps in a developer sandbox until then). And like any other search result, users will be able to vote them up or down.
Will adding all of these apps be enough to make WikiaSearch itself relevant? Currently, it is averaging a measly 50,000 search queries a day. That gives it a whopping 0.013 percent share of the U.S. search market. (Even AOL does about 17 million search queries a day).
I don’t get it. Facebook Apps allow viral applications that spread among friends. How does a multi-site search API become a Facebook App for search?
-Dash
http://adecon101.blogspot.com/
I don’t get it either but for different reasons. Isn’t Google a multi-site search engine. All this talk of APIs and Apps is confounding. Maybe Jimbo is a one hit wonder. I do hope Jimbo Wales gets rich though. After giving the world wikipedia, karma demands that he be rewarded.
do your homework, J. Wales is a snake oil salesman and you’re an idiot
Oh, and your site fucking sucks
The value here is in the inherent reach of search results. If Wikia Search were the size of Google, everyone and their mother would be using this API. But that’s top-down thinking…. it’d be like saying “If Wikipedia (circal 1996) were the size of Britannica, everyone and their mother would edit it.”
I guess Jimbo is hoping to build Wikia Search from the bottom, up.
It seems like it is a uphill climb for Wikia. I don’t see an incentive for search users to vote on the search results.
…maybe Derrick they will try something like Microsoft did with their search engine, actually PAY PEOPLE to use it
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
if it aint one wiki its another. many people were expecting a game changer. what is it with these self professed googl slaying search companies. search is 97% solved. the last 3% is about who has the greatest capacity to offer custom strategic vertical location, results and niche offerings.
MyLocator.com-Because Location is Everything
97% solved?
You still have to pull information by going to a webpage and typing an arbitrary query to get information. Solving that sounds like a lot more than 3%.
“Arbitrary is a term given to choices and actions which are considered to be done not by means of any underlying principle or logic, but by whim or some decidedly illogical formula. ” sounds like a geriatric surfer to me.
People do not search arbitrarily. common sense natural language rules the net. as a business and consumer if i want plumber in my area i type plumber and get a plumberlocator, enter a zip and wella’. humans know this and there its not a mystery . This is not 1995.
NaturalLocator.com
Great! This might actually be important if anyone used Wikia Search
“… to anyone who wants their own data or application to show up in results …”
I recommend reading the recent _Guardian_ column I wrote on Wikipedia’s history, and advertising:
http://www.guar...ipedia.internet
Relevant quote: “It’s informative to observe how long [Jimmy] Wales has been pursuing a strategy of selling advertising around other people’s work.”
Uhm, isn’t that more or less the central business model of the internet? Why is that so informative?
Few people are aware of Wikipedia’s historical connection to advertising, and Wales’s career orientation towards digital-sharecropping sites. The public-relations line is very different, and it’s informative to see how that story isn’t true. It’s the supposed extraordinary (altruistic?) made ordinary, which is worthwhile reading.
i tried it but biit confusing its not somthing like google
wikia confusing
search monkey is missing the URL
I’d love to see stuff like this at other search engines. Especially the Polar Rose widget brings a lot of new content to search wikia did not have before.
http://re.searc...ael%20arrington
Crunchbase widget, anyone?
Im not sure that this is anything new in the technology field but it is at least a little interesting to compare it to Face book. I like the idea of customizing but that is nothing new, guess time will tell if this work or not..
Amazon’s search outfit A9 has offered something similar for several years.
http://opensear.../opensearch.jsp
I don’t think its very popular – cool features in search don’t help if you don’t have much traffic to start with. I fear Wikia won’t fare any better.