A year ago, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales proclaimed he was going to take on Google by creating a Wiki-powered search engine.
Well, Wikia (alpha) has launched, and judging by the reaction by bloggers such as Michael Arrington (“a complete letdown”), Allen Stern (“It’s Not Ready Yet”) and Stan Schroeder (“Wiki Search Sucks”), you can only come away thinking this is the worst debut of a new Web service since Flock unveiled an alpha version of its social browser a couple of years ago.
Arrington’s scathing review includes this damning paragraph:
“First of all, it’s barely a search engine at all. It’s based on the open source Nutch software and contains an index of web pages created by Grub (a company Wikia acquired last year). The search results are poor and thin, as would be expected if not for the huge expectations that have been set. Absolutely no one is going to use this to search the web, until (and if) it is greatly improved.”
Welcome to the world, Wikia!
To be fair to Wikia, the blogosphere is being unfair. Bloggers like nothing nothing more to viciously sink their teeth into something with flaws/problems. It’s the nature of the beast – attack weakness while enthusiastically jumping on the bandwagon when something’s good. It is fair? Not really.
Right now, Wikia is far from perfect. I haven’t played with it much but the results are, at best, okay. Still, Wikia needs to start somewhere sometime. To get Wikia as good as it can get with people contributing search results, Wikia needs to launch. Only over time, can anyone determine whether it’s a success or failure – the same way that Mahalo’s fate will be determined, although it’s difficult to get too excited these days over Mahalo’s prospects.
Right now, Wikia’s biggest problems are:
1. Unrealistically high expectations because, after all, this is a Jimmy Wales-sponsored project with tremendous hype. Everyone is expecting greatness, not a still work-in-progress alpha.
2. An appetite for a search engine that can battle Google. Sure, Google has a great search engine but a lot of people would like to see a viable alternative, which explains the interest and financial support for Mahalo, Powerset, Wikia, etc.
The biggest question facing Wikia now is whether it can recover from critical first impressions. You could argue that Flock has never got its mojo back even though Flock 1.0 is a pretty good browser at a time when social networks, blogs, RSS and photo-sharing are so hot.
My advice to anyone disappointed with Wikia’s launch: be patient. If it hasn’t improved in a few months, you can squawk but to dismiss it now would be premature.
Technorati Tags: Google, Jimmy Wales, Wikia
