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
6 Comments
Thanks for the link; I haven’t seen your blog before, but it seems interesting; I’ll take some time to read it (;.
As far as Wikia Search goes, the community will ultimately make it a success or a failure. If they pick it up like they did Wikipedia – although, given the lack of tools to do that, I don’t see how – it might turn into an interesting project.
hey! if you read the first part of my review, i say that i wanted to love it – and i’ve been a part of the mailing list and community for this tool since day 1. maybe im not a blogger after all.
the issue in my opinion is that it shouldn’t have been launched to the public yet. it’s just not ready.
Despite the harsh feedback from the blogosphere, I think time will prove that Wikia will make a difference in the world of search, it has a nice set of tools and initial mix, but what matters most is how to respond to community feedback and figure out the right mix for a better search.
You can find my review here:
http://technozzle.com/?p=22
Alan,
It does make you wonder why Wikia launched before it is fully baked. Of course, there is never a perfect time to launch so sometimes you just have to throw the switch and see what happens.
I think a lot of people don’t understand the nature of this particular release. It’s an emergent platform, which means the alpha is not really intended to be the launch of a finished product but the beginning of a work in progress. A lot of us have been excited about the idea of crowdsourcing an user-generated content but Wikia Search really puts these notions to the test. Instead of slagging Wikia Search for failing to deliver the results you want, it would be better to write and contribute an entry that would help people with their own searches. An off-handed review takes a matter of minutes. Building a useful online search tool with the collective help of the planet is going to take a lot longer.
Shane:
I agree with you on all fronts.