About a year ago, we reported that Jimmy Wales was starting work on a wiki-like search engine. It’s here: Wikia Search was launched yesterday.

Will it change our perception of search engines? Is it a Google killer? I’ll say no, but on second thought I’ll say it’s too early to tell.

So far most reviewers have not been kind. Well, after all the hype that surrounded Wikia Search a year ago when Jimmy Wales declared that ’search is broken’ and promised to fix it the open source way, it’s only natural that they hold it to a high standard.

Another reason for the negative reviews is that the search engine is not finished yet. We are used to Google launching an essentially finished product in beta and keeping it that way for a long time. Wales & Co. launches an unfinished product. Why?

There’s a reason. On the About page of Search Wikia you can read:

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.

So Wikia Search isn’t like the others. It hasn’t grown up yet. It hasn’t gathered all the information and made all the connections it needs to go to work as a search engine. And in order to grow up, it needs people, like the rest of us. Wikia Search needs a community of people to search and contribute.

When you perform a search, you are encouraged to read and/or contribute to a ‘miniarticle’. Every search term has a placeholder for such an article, but at this time most of them are empty. In the time to come, we might see a myriad of them spring to life, at least if Wikia Search succeed in attracting active contributors and develop a true community.

You can also discuss the search results, and soon you will be able to rate articles (1 to 5 stars). Apart from this, it isn’t totally clear what the announced community and transparency consists of. There’s no FAQ and the About page holds little information.

I signed up for an account and got access to a tutorial, but that tutorial is mostly limited to an introduction to editing wiki pages. I get access to a lot of database listings, but I am given no assistance in interpreting these data. So, like many open source projects, Wikia Search suffers from lack of documentation, which is too bad.

Still, I’m curious. I’ll return in some weeks to see how it goes.

You might want to have a look at our take on all the fuzz when Wales launched his plans a year ago.