From an article titled Jimmy Wales argues that his Wikia needs more time
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The alpha launch of Wikia search engine has met with criticism from early users, but Wikia founder, Jimmy Wales, argues that he is “building something different”, adding that this takes time and community involvement.
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TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington called the product “an inexcusable waste of time” and said “Wikia search would be a disappointment even without the massive hype we’ve had to endure.”
Wales has himself admitted the, “search sucks” in comments relating to the review and Wikia has posted in bold on its own “about page” that “we are aware that the quality of the search results is low” and gives the reason of a lack of user feedback data.
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I think this misses the point. Wikipedia nofollowed all of their external links, except to Wikia portal sites. Like War Wiki for example. There's a Spanking Wiki, too, and it's not a resource for parents of trouble children, if you get my drift. Wikia is a for profit, ad laden site. Like Google, it profits from other people's work and content. Unlike Google, who still lets you keep yours, and only sends interested people to it, Wikia makes grand claims about who owns your labor. Supposedly for spam fighting, Wikipedia starts hoarding a great deal of Google's respect, and channels some of it toward for profit ventures.
The search quality isn't sucky, it's downright horrible. Try searching for Willy Lynch ( who bares at least a passing resemblance to Jimmy Wales, at least in the end goals they both achieved through free labor), and the first two results are identical!  http://monstersinmotion.com/ is #1 and #2, http://gaming.monstersandcritics.com/ is #3, and http://www.coldfusionvideo.com/a/aftershock.html is #4. That one doesn't actually seem to have anything to do with cold fusion web programming, but it certainly doesn't have anything to do with a slave owner from the West Indies.
If I had volunteered my time to go into this mess, I would be embarrassed and angry. Tech Crunch is right. Stumble Upon, the site that takes you to web pages at random, does a better job of showing people what they like. |
