New search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales invites the wisdom of the crowd.
Though Wikia Search debuted back in January (initially called Wikicities), new features introduced this week are enough of a leap forward to call this the official launch. It is a new search engine that closely resembles the Wikipedia model. Like the online encyclopedia, users are firmly in control. The basic engine indexes pages and provides generic results as a starting point. From here, users can edit, annotate, spotlight, comment, rate, add, and even delete results.
“Collectively, these new features put us a step closer to our goal of making the search process a much more participatory and democratic one,” said Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman of Wikia. “So, if someone runs a search and doesn’t find the result they’re looking for, we’re giving them the power to go in and fix it. It continues to be our belief that, over time, by adding the human element into search we’ll be able to produce more relevant, insightful results.”
If Wikia Search is anywhere near as successful as Wikipedia, it could eventually rival the likes of Google. The combined forces of crowdsourcing and the cognitive surplus have the potential to transform search and deliver more accurate and relevant results. Mahalo is attempting to add personalized value for the top 200,000 search terms, but the majority of the humans are paid. It is a labor-intensive process. Before Wikipedia, Wales started an online encyclopedia with paid experts and it didn’t fly. Only when he opened it up to the world did it take off.
Adding a site is as simple as entering the address. For example, we searched for “green living” and to our surprise didn’t find Max Gladwell on the first page of results. So we added it and then spotlighted it.
Then we edited it to better reflect the site itself.
And finally we added a comment and annotated it with our “about” link. The annotate feature allows you to add links, search boxes, photos, logos, and other features from the page. We weren’t signed in when we left the comment, so it only displayed our IP address.
And this is what the page looks like now (until someone else decides to put their stamp on it):
Between the five-star rating system and Ajax, you can move results up or down. You can get both Google and Yahoo! results with one click to compare. And users get their own profile page with all of your activity and a Facebook-like wall for posting messages to one another. All changes and additions are saved so others can see what’s been done to any given search result. Wales provides a quick intro video that shows how it might work for local moving listings:
Of course, there are concerns about spammers and other types who might want to disrupt the system. What’s essential is that the community quickly gains a core group of dedicated users to start refining the results and policing shenanigans. Since it tracks IP addresses, it will be easy to ban spammers and vandals.
2 responses so far ↓
1 wikia | Hottags // Jun 7, 2008 at 5:30 am
[...] Wikia Search Has the Results You WantThough Wikia Search debuted back in January (initially called Wikicities), new features introduced this week are enough of a leap forward to call this the official launch. It is a new search engine that closely resembles the Wikipedia …Max Gladwell – http://www.maxgladwell.com [...]
2 The Wiki Philosophy of Jimmy Wales | Max Gladwell // Jun 11, 2008 at 10:48 am
[...] founder Jimmy Wales and his new for-profit search startup, Wikia Search. We wrote about the open-source search engine already. Most are familiar with the story behind Wikipedia and its profound contribution to Web [...]
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