It's finally arrived. Today marks the launch of the much-hyped Wikia Search engine project, which according to its creator Jimmy Wales could turn out to be a future Google competitor. Wales - founder of Wikipedia - hopes that an open source, community-driven and human-powered effort can disrupt and remodel a market dominated by Google. Unlike Wikipedia, one of the 10 most visited sites on the internet, Wikia Search is being built as a commercial venture, which Wales hopes will eventually generate revenue from selling advertising on the site. The success of Wikipedia has also guaranteed and generated a significant amount of interest in Wikia Search.
It should be noted, however, that despite the hype surrounding Wikia Search, it is still at a very early stage of development. There may have already been some high-profile criticism of Wikia Search, but potential users of the search engine shouldn't expect it to be in a position to slay Google on its first day.
"Search Wikia is an extremely alpha project. It's a project to build a search engine and not a full-fledged competitor to Google yet. We want to make sure people understand that it's in its very early days," Wales said.
The premise behind Wikia Search is certainly interesting: a human-ranked search engine and mini-Wiki, coupled with a social-network-style function will allow users to rate the relevance of search results using a five-star system, which in turn influences and shapes future search results displayed to other users.
Initially, Wikia Search will crawl and index the web, providing users with algorithmically generated results, but with the added ability for users to rate the results, it could see higher quality pages attain high ranking while suppressing lower-quality spam. However, this would be dependent on users taking the time to rate results along with suitable monitoring technologies to ensure users don't try to 'game' the system. While some sceptics have argued that a more open approach may expose Wikia Search to more unscrupulous webmasters, Wales himself has predicted that a minimum of two years would be needed for the service to yield results akin to established search engines.
Meanwhile, the social network aspect of Wikia Search will allow users to create profiles and include basic elements such as photos, friends additions, information about interests, skills hobbies etc. Users can also search for other like-minded users using keywords and attach their profiles to particular search results. 'Mini articles' can also be added to search listings that can be edited and commented upon by users.
During its formative period, users of Wikia Search will only be able to perform general web searches, but the addition of tabs for images and news searches will come later and improvements to the search engine will be added frequently. Wales said of his plans for the engine to evolve:
"It's release early, release often. We want to be constantly updating the software every day,"
Wikia Search is an open source project - meaning that its software and data, including its crawler index, is freely available to anyone who wishes to use it. Some people may use this open source functionality to tweak their own websites and improve their rankings, but others may look to improve on the code itself. This means that, should Wikia Search prove successful, we could in turn see an explosion in user-made search engines - which, while perhaps not threatening the dominance of Google, Yahoo! or MSN, could still muddy the waters for the lesser players in the market.
