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Wikia Search Offers User-Edited Results
Posted by Lifehacker US Edition at 11:30 PM on June 5, 2008
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is trying out the technique that succeeded in putting together an online encyclopedia—opening it up so that anyone can edit it—to improving search results. Wales' user-edited search engine Wikia Search is now out of alpha and open to the public for edits. Search for a term on Wikia Search and rate the results to change their ranking, edit link titles and descriptions, and add links to results. To see what's perhaps Wikia Search's best feature, click the Annotate link. This lets you select a section of text on the web page to clip and add to the result.
For example, in a search for "Lifehacker," the Lifehacker Wikipedia page came up first and the actual web site second, so ranking Lifehacker.com high moved it up to the first position. Then clicking annotate (which loaded the Lifehacker.com front page in a separate frame), and selecting "Tech tricks, tips and downloads for getting things done" added that text to the result itself. The obvious problem here is the very real possibility of spammers and evil SEO-types running amok. Only time will tell if the Wikipedia approach will actually make for better or worse search results.
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
kuroshi
Posted 12:44 AM 6/6/08
Hmm...I'm not so sure about this. I'm going to vote on "worse", unless they have quite a few spam filters. I think that a bot constantly searching the intertubes is much more efficient and accurate than millions of users. However, using this approach lesser known sites will be moved up in rank. It's really up in the air for me, but I'm leaning more towards worse. But what do I know? Wikipedia works just fine, even if librarians claim it's never accurate...
kuroshi
Rhywun
Posted 12:35 AM 6/6/08
My guess is "worse". Why would I want my search results to resemble the contents of my Junk mail folder? Dumb idea.
Rhywun
downstairs
Posted 1:37 AM 6/6/08
What could possibly go wrong? How many millions of dollars (and hours) are spent each year trying to game Google's system? Now you're ASKING people to make changes to a search engine?
downstairs
OX4
Posted 2:08 AM 6/6/08
Seems completely unnecessary. We needed a free encyclopedia of all the world's knowledge. We don't need another search engine.
OX4
KenGirard
Posted 2:21 AM 6/6/08
Some of the things I think they need:
* A way to show how many people have rated a site
* When those ratings were made
* A way to filter sites based on those
This way I can tell the difference between "Best harddrive" written in 1999 and the one written last week.
I can also tell that 20k people have voted a 4.7 rating to a website, while 6 people voted a 5 to another one. This should help stop spammers from faking the numbers.
KenGirard
ghostwind
Posted 3:24 AM 6/6/08
@OX4:
@Rhywun:
+1
ghostwind
hansonc
Posted 3:14 AM 6/6/08
My problem is that everything I've tried searching for, the first result is Wikipedia.... If I wanted to search Wikipedia why wouldn't I just search Wikipedia?
hansonc
burnblue
Posted 8:07 AM 6/6/08
Wikipedia worked. I believe this will too. Google has failed me so often, being given the opportunity to fix results sounds great to me
burnblue
MrJenkins
Posted 9:28 AM 6/6/08
Its lack of content filter will be one reason many avoid it.
I would hardly advise my Mum to use it if occasionally somewhat innocent terms returned unsavory results.
MrJenkins
hansonc
Posted 2:12 AM 7/6/08
@burnblue: Wikipedia worked? Only if all you care about is Pokemon
hansonc
veniatregnum
Posted 12:37 AM 6/6/08
There also seems to be a bit of an Easter egg for each search result - if you click anywhere in the header you can customize the background image for any result page using images from flickr or pasting in the respective image url.
veniatregnum