Wikia Search Goes Live in Alpha Mode - Images, Indexes, and Interface, Oh My
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The results list itself was not particularly surprising. It was the standard 1-10 with links to each page, but the results themselves did not impress me. All ten were search engine optimization companies. Now, this might be fine for the companies, but what about someone who wants to learn what SEO is and how to do it? Perhaps I’m biased because I write for a content-rich web site, but a few short sentences defining SEO at the top just doesn’t cut it.
You can usually go to a cached version of a web page from the results. It’s not as useful to do this with Wikia Search as it is to do this with Google, though, because Wikia Search doesn’t highlight your search terms on the page. It uses the Nutch algorithm, which is why you see clickable numbers on the last row of each result. You can click the number to go to some code that explains why that particular result received the score it did. This is part of Wikia’s transparency.
To the right of the search results is a collection of images. These are people who, for whatever reason, are associated with our query. Hover over each image and you’ll get a name. Who would have thought that Joris Roebben looks like one of Homer Simpson’s neighbors? If you want to see where clicking on the images takes you, though, you have to register for an account and log in.
Below the gray box housing the images is another gray box that will take you to other indexes. For our query, Wikia lists three options. If you click on the question mark, though, you get a rather “enlightening” set of paragraphs:
I guess here should be some article about how the indexes work. I could not figure it out in (very) short time but decided to at least leave a note here. And because I am already here I would like to make a suggestion: I would love to have an "open stuff" index, so that when I search e.g. for a scientific paper I do not have thousands of hits that offer me to buy the article..
Yeah, me too, plus this paragraph is by another person. Nothing to indicate that. Clearly, this is meant to be a wikipedia like function. but why the heck would a help question mark on a piece of functionality be something anyone can comment on?
Service needs work Jimmy. I love what you've done, but not so sure what you're doing!
I checked the other three indexes listed; there’s really nothing to indicate that they might be more (or less) useful than the one used by Wikia. One of them did have Search Engine Land somewhere on the first page, at least, so that’s something.
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