Wikia Search, the new-ish open source search engine from the founder of Wikipedia, has just thrown open its doors for anyone and everyone to join the party. Jimmy Wales' latest brainchild is based on the principle of community regulation, with users editing and commenting on the results shown for any given query. Until this week, the supposed open source search facility was closed to editors except the elite 20,000 registered users that made up the "Alpha" period.With the relaxing of these strict alpha conditions, Wikia Search is now ready to brave the harsh reality that its results may never be the same again. This may not necessarily be a bad thing. Wales suggests that with the online community on hand to decide the rankings given across the search results, his site will be able to produce the fairest search results available. Users will not only be able to edit the results, but will be free to rate pages, alter the headline and description of the result URL and also add any part of a page into the search index.
The danger for Wikia is that with its results open for all to edit, some people may try to game the system by promoting sites inappropriately - especially on money making search terms. Then there is the annotation feature that allows users to add any section of a site to the Wikia Search index, which could also provide site owners with a tool for ensuring the updating of their sites in the search program.
While aware that the wiki model does present users opportunities for abuse, Jimmy believes in his philosophy of putting "editorial control into the hands of the community so that it's easier to do good than to do harm."
Wikia's founder is confident that his new project will succeed, and he has certain insurance policies up his sleeve. He'll retain the ability to "mass delete" any attempts at spam, and block specific users. All this is of course dependant on the search engine gaining a significant amount of the search market, and with its index currently standing at a meagre 30 million websites, there is still a lot of work to be done.
