Wikia Storming Into Search and Social Media (possibly)

Wikia Search, an open-sourced search engine, was released in January 2008 and made public by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, even though it has no association with the collective knowledge leaders. The recent update, alpha version 2, now allows users to add, remove, or change organic search rankings. Ratings, highlighting, and annotation are also available for users to edit results.

Wales says the project is a year in the making and that the ethos behind Wikia Search is to ”…build a freely licensed, completely open and transparent, community-driven search engine.” In Wales` estimation, Wikia Search will take a minimum of 2 years to reach industry standard quality. He admitted that there will still be some “glitches and bugs” that will need to be addressed along the way.

Initially, Wikia Search was accessible from http://www.wikia.com/ and those who wished to contribute in any way had to sign-up for an account. Those who signed-up gained access to a social network type site that allowed users have a profile, find old friends, find new friends, upload images and send messages to others also using Wikia. Users could also be associated with others who have similar interests as specified in their user profile. Even though the user login is no longer necessary, Wikia keeps track of changes made by either user ID or IP address. Wales confirmed a spike in site visits now that user credentials are no longer a necessity.

On the top of the search results page, a short “mini-article” will be displayed which is editable in a “pure wiki way”. Information, and possibly an image related to the search term, will also be shown. Wikia encourages user involvement by allowing users to edit these “mini-articles”. Thus far, approximately 25,000 “mini-articles” have been written by contributing users. Users are able to rank search results in terms of relevance and quality. This information will be used algorithmically to enhance future search results.

According to Wales, the search engine is based on transparency, community, quality and privacy. Search algorithms have traditionally been top secret, dishing out search results ranked according to the search engine. Wales says that Wikia is built on transparency and open standards. “Transparency and privacy go hand and hand.” Wikia is built on open source software, and claim that by using open source software they stay true to their belief in transparency.

Wales said he also anticipated adding advertising to the site. “We don’t have any specific plans, but that’s the general idea eventually. We just haven’t worried about it much yet,” he said.

Wikia seems to want to merge the worlds of search and social media. This forced evolution in the world of search seems like a valid and tangible idea, but in this case, Wikia seems to want to be a jack-of-all-trades-and-a-master-of-none. Search engines should focus on search, while social media networks focus on social media. The idea is fair. A small step in the right direction, but maybe the concept itself still needs some development. I`m not convinced just yet.