OK…the whole point of it wasn’t to build the best since search engine to rival Google but to build something different (well, either way…they should kick by trying to kick Google’s ass). As well as, the fact they are running a placeholder index over a full version (which personally, I think they should to see it all working).

However, it sucks and for many people waiting for around a year for this think as Jimmy Wales and his team promised a human powered search engine that could take on Google. Tonight that search engine launched in Public BETA see:alpha.search.wikia.com and I wouldn’t either bother opening it because it sucks

There’s a few reasons to why it sucks and one is that its based on open source script Nutch and also contains an index of web pages created by Grub (which Wikia acquired last year). The search results are generally irrelevant and don’t have enough results to say the least, which if it was a non-hyped search engine I would expect but not for this one.

As well as this the “human” factor isn’t really there at all - which kills the point of it and  currently users can keywords of things that they are interested in etc, so when a search is conducted by other users on those specific terms a the users avatar is shown in the right hand column (pretty stupid if 1,000,000+ users like the same keyword though). However users will be able to edit and improve results for searches they are interested in but if this gets popular, will be gamed by SEO experts trying to get their results ranking first. 

Another thing is that Wikia Search is basically another social network, and just like Facebook, Wikia Search profiles contain an activity stream of stuff you and your friends have been up to over the recent past.

Wikia will make the index available to third parties (so if it gets better then other search engines then search engine companies such as Google can get hold of their index analyse it and modify theirs accordingly.)

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