Wikia Search Alpha Launches with Poor Results
The long-awaited launch of Wikia Search Alpha, a Wikipedia-esque search engine has arrived. And I have to admit to being disappointed. It's no Google-killer. Heck, it's no Mahalo-killer either.
Since the inception of Wikia Search's Search-l mailing list last year, I've been quietly lurking but following their progress with some interest. It was great anticipation that I went to check out their just-launched (as of January 7th) alpha version of Wikia Search, an open source search engine. I took a look around the search engine and was pretty surprised to find that not only were the results irrelevant -- the top results weren't even in a language I could understand.
Let's take a look at the search results for "seo"...
Search Results in Search Wikia for SEO
Hmm... Japanese results in the top positions? There's nothing (useful) to see here (in the first page of results), keep moving... I didn't see a way to define my language settings and filter out non-English pages either.
Just for fun, I put my name into Wikia Search. I was relieved to see that this CNET blog was ranking, but my own, personal blog which has been around for years was at the bottom of the page. "Ed Stephan's Timeline of Sociology" was number two.
At this rate, Jason Calacanis (founder of Mahalo) has nothing to worry about.
- Topics:
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Miscellaneous
- Tags:
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Wikia Search,
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search engines,
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open source,
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Wikipedia
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