Wikia Search Alpha Launched
By Tony Ruscoe
Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales has finally launched the alpha release of his search engine Wikia Search to the public, and the Internet is buzzing with early reviews and thoughts. Unfortunately, the consensus so far (according to Techmeme) is that it’s pretty bad. But at least they know it.
Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.
We are aware that the quality of the search results is low.
Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.