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Fuzzy Logic Wikia Search still looking for answers
Fuzzy Logic Wikia Search still looking for answers | Wikia Search still looking for answers |
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| Written by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Tuesday, 08 January 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 The article elicited a range of interesting comments, including a few from Jimmy Wales himself, explaining the need to ‘release early, release often’ and to get the public involved in helping to create an open and transparent search engine in competition with Google’s ‘closed’ model. Wales replied on Arrington's blog that Wikia "is a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine. We’ve been telling everyone that constantly. I’m sorry Michael’s disappointed, but having said that, we didn’t build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases". Wikipedia's success over time was referenced when Wales said: "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!" He continued that: "So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it". Wales then explained the poor search results by saying that: "We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different". He also re-emphasised in a follow up comment that: "The search results are just being pulled from a placeholder index, so they suck. The social tools are being rolled out as we finish them. It’ll shape up, and hopefully eventually it won’t suck". The Wikia Search engine is built on top of the Lucene/Nutch open-source search engine code. The Nutch page lists a number of search engines that are meant to be using Nutch technology to power their search engines, but most of those seem to be no longer working. Nutch’s own site has a search box telling users they can ‘search the Nutch site with Google’, something that is clearly quite ironic. A Nutch user on Arrington’s site also noted that Wikia hadn’t made any contribution whatsoever to the Nutch forums, no questions asked or answered, no code or improvements shared. Wikia was promised over a year ago, and the very first version has finally arrived, only a few weeks after Google announced its ‘Knol’ project allowing users to share and contribute their knowledge in a project that challenges Wikipedia’s ever growing popularity. If Wikia can truly create a powerful, useful and accurate search engine for users that truly challenges Google, this can only be a good thing that spurs all those involved across companies to compete more fiercely to create ever better products for consumers. Still, Google’s results today are hard to beat – just ask all the competitors, and just ask users. If Wikia can create a critical mass of users and activity, it has a chance to build a solid search engine. Whether it’s enough to affect Google in any major way over the next couple of years is a question you won’t find the answer to on any search engine just yet!
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