Organic SEO Blog

Wikia Search, the open-source search engine launched sometime back by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, will begin letting public participate in building its index by adding, deleting and rating Web pages. Starting today, if you do a search on the engine and don’t like the results, you’ll be able to change them. Your changes will apply not just for yourself, but rather for everybody.

During its “alpha” period, which started in January, Wikia Search has drawn about 20,000 registered users who have in turn made about 60,000 edits to search results and written about 25,000 mini articles.

The editing you can do on Wikia Search is extensive. If you think a result on a search result page is too low or too high in the listings, you can influence its position by rating it. You can delete entries entirely or hand-write new ones. You can also rewrite the text of a search result, including adding code to the result.

http://alpha.search.wikia.com/ - Wikia Search, the most widely awaited search engine founded by Jimmy Wales, is slated to make its official debut today, with the bet that an open-source, community-driven effort can disrupt and reshape this Google-dominated market. Like its older sibling Wikipedia, this new service will be run by a community of users.

Google employs proprietary technology and the details of its ranking algorithm is a closely guarded secret. With Wikia Search, Wales is betting on a very different approach: transparency.

Wikia Search also allows people to publish mini-articles that are added to search results. In the near future, users will be also asked to rate individual URLs.

While perhaps unlikely that Wikia Search will ever achieve the unprecedented worldwide user adoption that Google currently claims, it’s refreshing to see the current status quo being challenged. No one can argue that there is still a great deal of room for improvement in SERPs, and Wikia Search is a interesting step forward.

search.wikia says

“Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.

Jimmy Wales, the founder Wikipedia claims that his company is ready to take on the might of Google and Yahoo, and grab as much as 5% of the search engine market.

Google and Yahoo are both ‘black boxes’ that keep their ranking algorithms a closely-guarded secret. Wales’s idea is to get users to work together to improve search engines, just as Wikipedia users do now.