At this point, Wikia Search is not the search engine you need. There are only 30 million indexed pages (”hardly a full crawl,” as Jimmy Wales puts it), and the results are sketchy and unreliable.

However, now Wikia Search is making the results heavily editable in a similar fashion as Wikipedia. I just did a search for our site, Equari, and it did not appear in the results. However, I was able to add equari.com, create a title and description for it, and spotlight it as the most relevant result for a search of “equari.”

One obvious problem with this is the fact that a site’s search engine placement can be the difference between success and failure financially. Unlike Wikipedia, there is a serious financial impact on the results that users highlight, alter, and move around within a search engine. Wikia Search, though, believes that wiki-style transparency will even out the results and make them more useful over time. There is a “recent changes” link that allows you to follow all the changes different users are making, either by their login names or ip addresses.

But will that be enough? It’s not hard to foresee people using Wikia Search as a sort of goof. For example, they may make their best friend’s homepage the top search result for “major league tool” and forward it to him on a goof (that just gave me an idea). While Wikipedia users have done a good job of policing spam, will a community form behind Wikia Search to be able to counteract the obvious problems that will arise?

One thing I’ve learned looking into this article: people like to rip on Wikipedia and Wikia Search founder Jimmy Wales. Early on in Wikia search, a picture of Wales’ estranged wife was the first result shown. Now, at least it’s him. While early opinion about Wikia Search on many blogs was that it “sucked,” a lot of top blogs are changing their tune and at least giving Wales a shot. But most of the comments scoff at this and Wales. One commenter on TechCrunch calls Wales a “con man,” while another said Wikia Search is “a f***ing joke.”

We’ll see how it goes.

Thanks to Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch and Rafe Needleman at Webware for some info.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 11:50 amand is filed under Search Engine Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.