New Search Engine Wikia Search Has Launched
January 13th, 2008 by hbond{{chris}} Search engine Wikia.com just launched. Will it be the fourth search engine?
Will Wikia Search become the fourth search engine next to Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Who knows. Perhaps the fact that it’s an open source platform will help it do so. Wikia.com is the brainchild of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Some of the more interesting things about Wikia Search are that it’s based on user managed content (like a Wiki) and that it’s Open Source. Since the engine is absolutely new – the quality of the data in it is very low. However, if it takes off the quality of the data will increase dramatically because of the power of the community contributing to it.
I’m a little sceptical though. Any social media platform can be gained – and this is no different. While it requires a large crowd of resources to influence it – there is nothing preventing someone from enlisting the help of a large crowd!
Only time will tell! I urge you all to test out Wikia Search and become a participating member. It will only be good if many people participate!
Thanks for the info. It sure would be nice to have a competitor to google.
I agree. I’m just not sure what it will take to get one of the other engines to steal some of the market share away!
Perhaps it will just require time for Google to become stale.
Competition can only help!
I have been following this story for a couple of weeks. I too will be watching with interest to see how it does. As I understand it, this initiative will also seek to provide users with the ability to modify the search code for their own needs…sweet!
It would be interesting to setup your own search engine on a specific topic using this open source software!
I don’t know if I personally like this. I’m more afraid of possible abuse then anything. I don’t know if it will take off anyway, other peer reviewed sites haven’t… apart from wikipedia lol
It looks good. Nice attractive name. Theres a lot of money going into it being set up. But whether it can rival the big three in google, yahoo and msn i doubt it. Looks promising though.
Hey Andrew – only time will tell. The fact that it’s different is promising!