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Wikia Search Upgrades Get Closer

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the step-in-the-somewhere-direction dept.

Barence writes "Wikia Search has been revamped with a wealth of editing tools, to build on its early promise of being a more open search engine. The firm behind Wikipedia has introduced a wealth of editorial tools allowing users to directly edit and annotate results with text, images and links, as well as spotlight specific searches or even delete a site from the search results, a change which affects everyone who conducts that search in the future." Update: 06/04 17:32 GMT by T : Jimmy Wales wrote to point out that despite his role in founding Wikipedia, Wikia is a completely separate company.

4 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Problems? by FooAtWFU · · Score: 3, Informative

    as well as spotlight specific searches or even delete a site from the search results, a change which affects everyone who conducts that search in the future." Anyone else see anything wrong with this? I want my results to be as agnostic as humanly possible, which means keep human hands out of my results.

    Good. Have fun searching spam.

    Seriously, even Google's PageRank stuff relies on "human hands" placing links to documents on web pages.

    --
    The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
  2. Re:Problems? by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 3, Informative
    I'm pretty sure you don't know how Page Rank works.

    From Wikipedia .....

    PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents The results are based on an algorithm, not human manipulation. While PageRank isn't perfect, it is still about as good as anything else out there.
    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  3. Re:Problems? by pablomme · · Score: 3, Informative

    The results are based on an algorithm, not human manipulation. The GP's point is that the data the algorithm uses is supplied by humans (those who write the webpages that link to other webpages).

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    The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
  4. Re:Closer to What Exactly? by saibot834 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Wikia Search needs time. Like Jimbo says, when he started Wikipedia he called it an encyclopedia, even though at the time there were no articles. Wikia Search is still Alpha and people should stop thinking its a finished or even practically usable search engine. (Here is an interesting conversation with Jimbo (read the comments))

    BTW: There seems to be some confusion about Wikia and Wikipedia. Short info:
    * Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that uses MediaWiki and is run by the Wikimedia Foundation
    * MediaWiki is a popular Wiki-Engine
    * Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia and several sister projects
    * Wikia is a for-profit organization that has _nothing_ to do with Wikipedia _or_ the Wikimedia Foundation! One of their projects Wikia Search; but they also host many Wikis. The only thing Wikia has in common with Wikipedia is that it uses MediaWiki and was started by Jimbo Wales.