[Search-l] What Is Wikia and How Real Is It?

[John McCormac]

(I've just spent the last day or so checking approximately 2.5M .uk 
domains and websites so apologies in advance if this appears as a bit of 
a rant.)

What exactly is Wikia? Is it a search engine or just a form of hybrid 
super directory based on Wikipedia and similar sites?

So far there has been nothing real about this project beyond what is 
effectively just another wiki about the idea of a search engine. Talking 
about search engine development is all well and good but there has to be 
real development taking place. Otherwise this will just end up as 
another vapourware search engine like Dipsie and so many others.

What worries me about this whole project is that the people at the top, 
despite having a lot of other experience, have no recognisable search 
engine development experience (from what I've seen). Having the search 
engine software is only a small part of the project. It is like having a 
jet without a pilot or fuel. Though with Grub, it is not so much a jet 
aircraft as a bicycle with the handbars and wheels missing.

Perhaps Wikia has a few people who have been hired who actually have 
done more than just read about search engine development. If Wikia is to 
be a Google Killer then it has to have such real operators rather than 
toy soldiers. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all take search deadly 
seriously and have a lot of research going on. They will not concede 
marketshare gracefully. This is why I think that talk of Wikia being a 
Google Killer is marketing hype when compared to the reality of these 
search engines. Looksmart (the company that bought Grub and sold (?) it 
again to Wikia) got slaughtered by these players.

I'd like to see a lot more diversity in the search market. Hopefully 
Wikia has a chance of providing some. How may websites does Wikia expect 
to spider? Does it have a clear idea of how many websites are out there 
on the net? How will it deal with the languages issue or is it going to 
be a universally English language operation?

This talk of Open Source and opening up search is all very nice. The 
whole opening up of search engine algorithms is quite ridiculous because 
once they are open, it becomes easy to game the search engine. (This 
would be an argument for the hybrid quality controlling effect of a 
wikipedia type approach.) Google found this out with its Page Rank and 
other search engines had similar problems. The gaming of the algorithms 
is one of the major problems that the large search engines spend a lot 
of time trying to solve. They continually tweak their algorithms to make 
them more effective and less prone to gaming.

Making the data available is also a bit of a red herring. Just how much 
data do the people in Wikia think would result from a full crawl of the 
web? Or just taking some of the minor gTLDs - how much data would result 
from a crawl of .info or .biz?

How would webmasters react to their data being made freely available 
like this? Every spam scraper and MFA (Made For Adsense) plagiarist 
would have a field day with this data. But the sheer size of the data 
resulting from a full or even a limited crawl makes the whole 
downloadable aspect highly questionable. Google and the other major 
players have thousands of servers. Unless Wikia is to be some P2P type 
engine, it will take a lot more investment to make Wikia a viable threat 
to the main players.

Who benefits?
What makes Wikia different?
How close to realisation is it?

Regards...jmcc
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John McCormac  *  e-mail: jmcc at whoisireland.com
MC2            *  voice:  +353-51-873640
22 Viewmount   *  web:  http://www.whoisireland.com/
Waterford      *  blog: http://blog.whoisireland.com
Ireland        *  Irish Domain Stats & Market Research
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