HomeSearch Wikia Goes Live
By Jason Smith, Business Development Manager, White Hat Media
Search Wikia, a new open source search engine was launched today in an alpha version. Search Wikia is the brain child of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and his company Wikia, Inc. Wikia Search aims to improve search by letting users change search results in a fashion similar to how users edit entries on Wikipedia. Jimmy Wale has stated that this new search tool will reduce the “bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic.”
Wikia Search was born initially in July 2007 when Wikia, Inc acquired a distributed search project called Grub and Jimmy Wales announced he was going to release this product with an open-source license. But there are many people in the online community that are sceptical about this new search engine and its ability to dethrone a giant like Google. Sceptics believe that Jimmy Wales does not really understand the scale of what Google has to handle in terms of the queries from around the world.
The question on every ones lips is will Search Wikia and its user-edited model be able to scale to the demands of consumer search engines. Google indexes billions of pages and has become deep rooted into daily lives of internet usres, providing them with highly targeted search results, Wikia Search on the other hand will launch its search engine today with only around 50 to 100 million Web pages indexed. It’s truly a David vs. Goliath battle. Even though this new internet search tool has been now officially released, Search Wikia is still essentially useless as a search engine because even Search Wikia admit themselves that the search results being produced are currently very poor.
Lets now sit back and see if Search Wikia can in time start to index the same amount of websites as Google and more importantly will they be able to stay ahead of the spammers.
