Everything Else

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia announced that he is working on a new type of search engine sometimes called "Wikiasari" or Wikia Search.

It sounds to me that he hopes to somehow combine social networking and social editing like Wikipedia with a deep spidering search engine. Frankly, despite heckles from SEO's, it sounds like a noble goal.

Will it be a Google-killer?

Well the odds are against it, but that does not mean a worthwhile, usable and commercially self-sustaining major search engine cannot come out of this project. A lot of average Internet users, that I know personally use Wikipedia as a starting point in their searches so it is not unreasonable for Wikia Search to gain a following from traffic fed by Wikipedia.

I'm trying to ponder what Wikia Search will look like. A lot of people think Wikia Search will not scale, and that is true if you are rely only on humans to index the web. But if you also incorporate a unreviewed spidered index and a very good ranking algo then I think it can scale much better - if you keep that index fresh.

I'm a directory guy and while I recognize directories are fast becoming obsolete I have always thought that combining a human edited index of quality sites with a spidering engine on a large scale would be interesting proposition. Of course, Yahoo and NBCi used to do this years ago, but if you can actually spider the pages of the sites that have been human reviewed and broaden the participation in the human review process from just a few editors to a bigger base it might help. But it depends on how you do it: back in the old days when Searchking was trying to build a real search index it relied on human voting to determine relevancy, but since only a tiny percentage of users ever voted it rendered that ranking scheme almost useless. The lesson there is that most people just want to get find their information and leave in as few clicks as possible so very few are going to stop and vote of edit unless it directly benefits a basic need. That is something the Wikia people need to keep in mind because it almost invites spammers to game the system. Chris Sherman has more on social search.

I think the bottom line is, we still need some innovation in search engines, and we still need more major search engines with their own indexes than just the Big Four. Five major search engines would be better and six would be better still, especially if that will siphon off users from Google which controls too much of the search traffic right now. If Wikia Search can do it then I'm all for it.

Source: SEORoundtable