Wikia Search Goes Live in Alpha Mode - A Transparent Search Engine
(Page 2 of 4 )
Wikia Search is based on the “concept…of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way.” It’s not working too well as of yet because, at the beginning, it has no user feedback, but the company expects results to improve rapidly in the weeks and months ahead. This is somewhat reminiscent of the course that Wikipedia took; Jimmy Wales admitted he had to supplement the content of many of the articles in his anyone-can-edit-it encyclopedia before it reached a certain critical mass.
Here’s a shot of the search engine itself:
Of course a bare page doesn’t really tell you what a search engine can do. I decided to search for – what else? – “search engine optimization,” without the quotes, to see what would come back. Some of my results were predictable, but others…well, I guess a picture will give you a much better idea:
Let’s check out the parts of this page one by one. As you can see, there are plenty of results, though of course not as many as Google would deliver. Then again, who goes all the way to the end of Google’s results anyway?
You’ll notice a link right next to the list that says “discuss these results.” It leads to a “mini talk” on the search’s topic. As of this writing, that talk has no content.
As you can see, there are four links at the top: “Mini,” Discussion,” “Edit,” and the plus sign (+). This is one way the search engine gets feedback about its results. I’ll hold off on covering this for the moment, and stick to the main results page.
Right at the top of the page, just below the sentence telling you how many results came back, you’ll see a gray box. That box contains a mini article about your search topic (search engine optimization in this case). These are written by volunteers. What you’re seeing is the collapsed version of the article. You can click on links to expand it, show its revision history, or go to the full article. In this case, the full article and the expanded version are one and the same; I assume that for some searches, an expanded version of an article is still somewhat short, while the “full” version is rather longer.
Here is an image showing this mini article’s revision history:
Next: Images, Indexes, and Interface, Oh My >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
