Happy New Year! I hope everyone enjoyed their break. Our holiday memories will hopefully stay with us for at least another week.
So now back to reality. Wikia Search launched. We instantly had clients calling about their rankings on Wikia Search. That is 2008 search marketing energy. I love it! The Search Strategists at Catalyst are busy analyzing the new engine. The reviews about Wikia Search have mostly been negative…”not much of a search engine, the technology stinks, there is nothing human about it”, etc.
Jimmy Wales and the folks at Wikia Search are fully aware of their search engine short comings stating, “It’s a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine.” They even go as far as providing a Wikia Search disclaimer on their site with pleas for mercy like, “So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.”
And in all fairness (I do have to represent both sides - I was a girl scout) Jimmy Wales reminds us, “When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!”
Wikia Search is trying to build something different and hoping we will come. They use a social networking model and rely heavily on user participation.
So, like so many other overly hyped launches in our search world, time will tell if Wikia Search will be a contender or is simply this month’s flash in the pan. I personally do not believe Wikia Search has the chops to be a meaningful player in 2008 and I’d love to hear what you have to say about it.
One Comment
Heather, it will never work. Wikipedia is a non-profit project that aims to “give the world knowledge”. That’s something that volunteers can get on-board with, and even still, they fight night and day about conflicts of interest.
Why would volunteers give their time and energy to a FOR-PROFIT search engine, unless it’s to game their own self-interests? Wikia Search will have all the traffic of Webcrawler.com if we even remember to come back and check it in 2009.
Here’s another big-hype project of Jimbo’s — Openserving.com. Remember that one? What happened to Openserving?