Wikia was launched at the turn of the new year (Jan ’08 that is). Pete wrote a great blog about it, but as that was 6 months ago I thought it’d be worth going back and taking another look- with a different perspective.
My idea of what a search engine should be is clearly quite different to Jimmy Wales’, but that doesn’t mean I think Wikia has no place on the web- far from it. Calling Wikia a search engine is a little ambiguous for my taste. Sure, it provides search results, but they’re collated in a markedly different way than the current methods used by Yahoo!, MSN Google etc. That difference is why I’m not sure it really qualifies as a search engine any more.
For a good discussion of Wikia have a look at this cnet article, and for the most recent changes look here.
As I’m a little vain I used Wikia to search myself, and see what those changes are like. The first thing that brought a smile to my face was the amount of editing you can do. To shunt a result up or down the SERP you can rate it- but that’s lame compared with the “delete” option- editing snippets is a pretty cool feature too.
Anyway, here’s how it hangs together…
Search result:
Add another search result for that search term:
Added search result:
Editing snippet information
Adding related search terms:
Related posts:
