Wikia Search Goes Live in Alpha Mode - Logging in and Contributing
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It seemed as if there were certain features I couldn’t access unless I created an account. To register, I gave Wikia a screen name, password, email address, and my real name. That last was optional. Wikia needed the email address to send a confirmation email. It showed up within a few minutes. Once you’re registered and logged in, you can edit your profile. Profiles look very much like what you would expect if you’ve spent any time on social sites; here is mine before I added anything:
Now that I’d registered and logged in, I could click on the images associated with my search and look at profiles. That’s nice; I understand the privacy issue. But I can’t say that I think much of a search engine that won’t give me any information about people who are important to my search. Perhaps Wikia should add an option to its profiles that allows users to add a paragraph about themselves that they don’t mind making public to those who use the search engine but are not registered with it.
You do get more options when you’re logged in when it comes to editing articles. There is also a tutorial that welcomes you to Wikia Search and explains how to edit, report bugs, etc. The interface feels a little awkward if you’ve never edited Wikipedia – a relevant point, since Wales is trying to appeal to a larger audience, including those who may never want to edit a search engine entry or Wikipedia article. Conversely, since anyone can edit certain things, such as the mini articles, they’re potentially open to abuse (or at least some rather strange self-focused content, as I showed you in the previous section). Here’s a telling point: Matt Cutts’ profile notes that he is “Thinking about spam on Nutch,” the algorithm that drives Wikia Search.
After trying several other searches on the search engine, I have to agree with most of the reviews. Wikia Search is clearly in alpha. It is not ready for prime time. It was launched in the same way that Wales launched Wikipedia, without much content. But, as other observers have pointed out, Wikipedia had little online competition. Wikia Search is competing with the major search engines plus hundreds of niche search engines. Many of these are already human-powered; think social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, some of which are even supplemented by crawlers, like Searchles. It’s questionable whether Wales will attract enough interest in Wikia Search to give it any value -- his rivals include the best search engines with the brightest thinkers money can buy, and his approach is unproven in this field.
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