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On Jaunuary 7th Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia has launched his latest open source project called Wikia Search.
Wikia Search is currently in Apha and can be found at alpha.search.wikia.com. So far the reviews have been overwhelmingly negative.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch calls it “a complete let down” and Stan Schroeder of Mashable calls it “miles behind the competition”, I say give it a year or two and see what the open source community can do with search. They have surprised the world with the success of Linux and Wikipedia, so succeeding at search may still be possible.
I do admit when testing out the new search engine the results were pretty dismal. The current version of Wikia Search does not even come close to Google, Yahoo or MSN. It’s not even ready to compete with smaller sites like Mahalo, so don’t expect to see a spike in traffic visiting your site from Wikia Search any time soon.
One of the reasons people are so disappointed with the new search engine, is that ever since it was announced in late 2006 it has been hyped as a Google killer. Jimmy Wales has done his part to fuel the fire with statements referring to Wikia Search as the early stages of a “Google-quality search engine”. He has also stated that “Wikia Search will start to change search from being proprietary, top-down, and closed”.
Wikia Search plans to make it’s index available to the public and its back end will all be run on open source software.
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