Loosing Site

Today Wikia launched the alpha version of its search engine. With a combination of technologies from the Wikimedia Foundation and the Apache Foundation (Lucene, Nutch), Wikia has some surprising features. When you conduct a search, in addition to the expected list of websites you get:

• a collaboratively edited “Mini Article” with information about your search topic
• a list of users whose profiles match your search terms

Wikia effectively combines three established web technologies:

• search
• wikis
• social networking

with each topic becoming an ad-hoc social network.

This is an alpha release, and the gaps in the feature set are clearly visible.

• no advanced search
• missing documentation
• a decorative, but unimplemented ratings function

This mix of technologies brings up some interesting questions. Will users participate? How effectively will the community deal with spammers? Where will the balance be reached between findability and privacy? Will the “People” results be dominated by domain experts, subject enthusiasts or spammers?

Wikia Search is innovative, with potential for business and personal networking. Its success will depend on the strengths of the communities it engages.