Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has launched a new version of Wikia Search, a search engine based on the notion that communities of people can produce better search results than Google’s sophisticated algorithms.
Conceding that the previous version of Wikia Search — launched in January to universal criticism — “pretty much sucked,” Wales said the new version allows users to “participate like never before, by editing and adding to search terms in a way no other search engine ever fathomed.”
The search-results page in Wikia includes a field that lets users recommend Web pages for a given search. Even more radical, users can rate, delete, annotate, spotlight and add comments to each Web page returned as a search hit.
Add, Annotate, Delete
Deleting does not actually remove the page from the results, but reduces the hit to a URL with a strike-through. Spotlighting puts the result at the top of the page inside a tinted box. User comments are displayed under each search result. In addition — just like on sites such as Netflix.com or Amazon.com — users can give a star rating to each search result.
Such user feedback to a search engine’s results are unprecedented. None of the major search engines provide for any feedback at all. Still, community features can go only so far. Most search users are not trying to build a search engine, only to find what they’re looking for. And Wikia’s initial results so far are substantially inferior to the mainstream engines.
For example, a search with the term “Fourth Amendment” on Wikia brings up a Wikipedia article as the top-ranked hit, but also a FindLaw article on the First Amendment and press releases from U.S. congressmen. Several other results are off-topic. By contrast, all of Google’s first-page hits led to pages giving the text of the amendment or explaining its…