Wikia Search Launches Wikipedia-Style Search Engine
Back when Wikia Search first unveiled its alpha preview, we found it wanting. On Tuesday, the site was relaunched, and not only has its index expanded, but the community editing tools are live and ready for your input.
The basic idea behind Wikia Search is to take the Wikipedia community model and apply it to the search engine. Searchers can edit, add, remove, re-order, rate, annotate, and comment on the search results.
The site’s new Ajax interface allows you to drag results up and down the page and you can edit the title or description of a result using a nice edit-in-place interface.
The index itself is up to 30 million pages, which obviously is nowhere near the big search engines. But even Wikipedia was once just a single page, and look where that’s gone. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the same sort of community interest will develop around the search engine, but with the involvement of Wikipedia’s founders and Jabber creator Jeremie Miller, it has some momentum. PCWorld has an overview of the project’s recent enhancements.
If you missed out on the early days of Wikipedia, here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor of a growing community. With the editing features in place you can help Wikia Search become more effective and share your best results with everyone else.
However, the community-driven aspect also opens Wikia search to spam and abuse, so it will interesting to see how effective the community is in policing and removing spam.
While it’s too early to replace Google for the serious search engine user, Wikia Search is definitely one to keep an eye on.
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