Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikia, launched a new project to address what he says are the shortcomings of current search engines. But one analyst said he isnt so sure Wales efforts do much to improve the current model.
The much-hyped Wikia Search debuted on Monday in alpha phase. The search platform, founded on open source and human collaboration, is now open to contributions from everyone.
Wikia Search lets users engage in traditional social-networking activities, such as creating a personal profile, adding friends, sharing photos, and managing privacy settings. Any user can discuss and rank search results, and write or edit "Mini Articles," among other activities.
YOUR OWN SEARCH ENGINE
The Wikia Search projects infrastructure is fully open, meaning that anyone -- from home hobbyists to entrepreneurs to startups -- can use the technology to build a new search engine. The infrastructure includes open access to indexes and downloads of compressed crawl data.
According to the company, the Wikia Search community is devoted both to transparency and to privacy -- meaning every ranking decision is open to the public and absolutely nothing is automatically stored about any users executed search queries.
"We believe that a completely open foundation must drive the future of search, following the same principles as the Internet and Web that it builds upon," Jeremie Miller, a Wikia Search Architect and founder of Jabber, said in a statement. "Search is becoming one of the most powerful tools humankind has ever created -- only transparency and open participation will protect these tools from abuse."
Wales has a solid track record for shifting paradigms on the Internet. Since Wikipedias launch in November 2004, for example, more than 800,000 articles on 3,000 topics have been created and edited by over 200,000 registered users in 70 languages. However, some analysts arent so quick to jump on the Wikia Search bandwagon.
DELIVERING ON THE HYPE
"Wikia Search doesnt deliver against the hype," said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. "Right now its an undifferentiated product," he said. "It has elements of a social network and it has the look and feel of a conventional search engine, but its not significantly different from existing search or social networks to make much of a dent in anybodys market share."
Wikia Searchs central problem is overhype caused an alpha disappointment, Sterling added. Without so much hype, he said, folks would have viewed it as an interesting work in progress. Instead, he went on to say, the idea of Wikia Search being a "Google-killer" and an application that would be "Googles worst nightmare" overpromised and underdelivered.
"Wikia has to take a long-term view of the market," Sterling concluded. "Over time, Wikia Search may develop into something interesting if they can keep the cost of this low and really leverage the community. It largely remains to be seen what comes of this."
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