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Wikia Search Upgrades Get Closer
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.
Don't get me wrong, that's about all Wikipedia had going for it at one time. That and a meager couple thousand pages.
But I think Wales' search project should aim a little higher at this point in time
Also, maybe the reward system should be a little more tangible, like Wikipedia's? I mean, people get a kick out of seeing something they write benefiting everyone in the world. I personally don't get a kick out of knowing that if someone searches for 'Lola by The Kinks' it now comes up with more accurate results. I question the rewards although, to be fair, I also questioned the rewards of Wikipedia.
It shall be interesting to see whether or not this takes off. I encourage Wales to keep trying because even if this doesn't work, it certainly hasn't cost me anything. I wish him and his staff the best of luck!
My work here is dung.
So true. While the philosophy of Wikipedia and Wikia would perhaps hope that this would bring more "relevant" search results, it will be controlled by agendas. Wikipedia is, but so many people with different agendas edit it that everyone pulling in different directions "tends" to move it toward the middle. Since results can simply be deleted in Wikia Search, and one must go to some effort to find them again, the first person with an agenda who edits a search (the first person who edits the search), will most likely skew that search to their bias forever.
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The major players in the computer business seem poised for a wave of mergers, and when that happens we won't have "agnostic" search results anymore. Instead, we'll have advertiser-driven search results skewed to improve the corporate bottom line. In the near future, an open-source community-driven search engine will be a very valuable resource to have.
That's not what that sentence says. What wikia has are buttons that try your search on other search engines. It's like Google having a button "try this search on Altavista". Not a great functionality on established search engines, but on a system like this, that needs to find it's place, it's a pretty good idea.
The main reason they're doing this, I imagine, is that they want to be people's home page, so it's a good idea to offer the same functionality as their previous homepage (eg. Google).
All Data is touched by Humans, so that is a specious argument.
Data that is massaged by humans to get a certain result is tainted. Which is one of the flaws of PageRank system. I didn't say PageRank was perfect, just about as good as it gets.
The point is, whenever someone learns how to game the system, it will end up like when PageRank gets exploited by irrelevant websites pointing to each other.
I prefer a system where gaming the system is less likely. The approach here is to actually game the system.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Okay, we have all heard ten times now, that "Wikia is not affiliated with Wikipedia". Then, why on Earth does it use this name?
I know, I know, they do wiki-stuff and so on. But I can't help thinking that if anyone else besides Jimmy Wales had come up with that name, he would have a counterfeiting lawsuit at his neck right now.
I'm not sure it's such a good idea either. Forever, it will be "The-firm-that's-not-affiliated-with-wikipedia". I can already see the crowds of wikeeks (wiki-geeks. clever, I know) who'll slowly get horribly annoyed by having to explain this over and over again, once wikia does anything remotely bad (like loosing data, censoring, or some privacy cock-up), throwing a dark shadow on wikipedia.