Filed under: Web services, Social Software, Search, web 2.0
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has relaunched Wikia Search. And this time, the site actually might be worth using.
When Wales announced that he was working on a human powered search engine to compliment his human powered encyclopedia, we were skeptical but curious. When the public alpha launched earlier this year, we were disappointed. Up until this week, Wikia Search was basically just like any other search engine. A personal scanned the internet for pages and decided which were the closest match to your search query. The only thing setting Wikia Search apart was the capability to create user profiles.
Now Wikia Search has added a slew of editing tools that could actually help improve (or utterly screw up) search results. Here’s how it works. Wikia Search has a computer-created index of about 30 million sites. But you can edit any page. For example, when we searched for “download squad” this site came up as the second listing. We gave it a five star rating which moved it to the top of the page. And then for good measure, we hit the edit button and wrote a new site description. You can do this for any site. you can also add comments, annotations, or “spotlights,” which highlights the entire entry so that it looks a bit like a sponsored result you would get from Google.
[via WebWare]
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