Well, this is one we have all been waiting for here in the Vertical Leap UK office.
Plenty of people are aware of the Wikipedia, whether you are an Internet Marketer like the staff here at VL, or whether if you are a normal searcher. Wikipedia is widely used as an information resource, I even used it when I was doing some initial research for my dissertation when I was at uni – I wasn’t able to cite it directly because it was not considered of proven integrity, although I believe there is some debate as to whether or not this should continue as articles are becoming better cited, although I digress.
The point is that the Wikipedia has been a dominant force in the search engine results pages (SERPs), I think that it probably appears in the top 5 for at least 1/3 of the things that I am ever searching the internet for (although I suspect that my browsing patterns are somewhat different from a normal browser).
As a result of the prominence of the Wikipedia, there are high hopes for the Wikia Search engine – and although it has now gone public, it has been launched in "Alpha". It looks quite pretty, but not particularly different from many of the other engines’ home pages.
There are options to sign up/login in the top right hand corner, the main search is performed in the middle of the screen, and there is the standard links to terms and conditions etc at the bottom (mind you, half these footer links weren’t doing anything when I tried to click them).
So, when you performed a search, you are greeted with the following screen. I’m going to break down the rest of my blog looking at the different areas of these results:
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