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January 18, 2008
Wikia's baby steps
If you have not yet checked out the new, and controversial, Wikia search, then I suggest that you take a look. If you're unaware of the project in general, Wikia is self-described as "a freely licensed (open source) search engine ... [based on] trusted user feedback from a community of users."
As many other, and smarter, people have said before I have, it will take a long time for this engine to build up a data base significant enough to make it work effectively. Think of the time it took Wikipedia to grow. It was fast...but not immediate. On the site's "about" page it even admits that the results are now bad. I would ask people not to write this off immediately, but to watch it, play with it from time to time, and definitely to be aware of it as all good library staff should be aware of new technology initiatives.
January 18, 2008 | Permalink
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If you want to see what Wikia Search should be like, take a look at Earthfrisk at http://www.earthfrisk.org which isn't at all bad. Still got some way to go but it does show that it IS possible to launch a human powered search engine that's reasonably functional.
You're quite right about Wikia though - the point is that it's NOT a search engine, as Wales pointed out, it's a project to build a search engine. And even in this stage, it's better than the disaster that is Mahalo!
Posted by: Phil Bradley | January18, 2008
