Earlier this week, the Wikia wiki-based search engine launched it’s first public alpha. For a search engine in such an early stage, it’s really quite nice. It’s user maintained, and I like the mini-summaries it provides for your search results. It would be nice if there was a whiteboard for each search result, where users could make quick notes about their search results and findings that would benefit other users.
I also like the URL’s more. “http://re.search.wikia.com/search#ubuntu” looks much less intimidating to users than “http://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.debian:en-US:unofficial&client=iceweasel-a” or “http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=ubuntu&ei=UTF-8&fr=”.
It also has nifty profile pages for its users/contibutors, which seems similar in some ways to the Facebook profile pages.
While Wikia Search has come a long way in a short time, the actual search content need a lot of work. But if you consider the rate at which Wikipedia is growing, and if Wikia Search only grows half as fast, it might be everyone’s favourite search engine quite soon.
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January 11th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Except that by abusing URL fragment identifiers this way they break compatibility with non-Javascript browsers like links.
Why not use http://re.search.wikia.com/search?ubuntu instead?
January 12th, 2008 at 1:12 am
I was just going to comment the same as Marius, I can’t think of a reason to use the fragment identifier instead of the normal query specification!?
January 12th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
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Andrea Infurna
Free Penguin - Free as in Freedom
[email protected]
wwww.freepenguin.it