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

[peter burden]

John McCormac wrote:
> (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 
>   
I wouldn't agree. At least one model is to allow end-users directly (or 
indirectly)
to specify their ranking algorithm from a set of parametrisable 
alternatives. This
would be pretty un-gameable since the gamesters would have no a priori
knowledge of which algorithm (from infinitely many) a searcher would 
actually
be using.
> 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
>