A liger with no teeth -- yet
In its current form, Wikia Search is a calamitous disappointment;
that means there's nowhere to go but up


by Ivor Tossell
webseven@globeandmail.com
January 11, 2008

You might say the launch of Wikia Search was a disastrous success. It was a disaster, all right, but then, sometimes the best way to announce yourself at the pool party is with a belly flop.

The hype around Wikia Search has been brewing for a year now. Spearheaded by Jimmy Wales, the man who invented Wikipedia, it promised to be the anti-Google. Just as Wikipedia is a community-powered encyclopedia, this was to be a community-powered search engine, open and transparent.

Crossing Wikipedia with search sounded promising in concept - in the way that suggests crossing a lion and tiger to make a mighty liger, ready to take down giants.

"Google killer?" said a genial Wales, when I spoke to him before the launch. "That sounds very exciting, but a little optimistic."

In the same breath, though, he insisted that his product is meant to compete head-to-head with Google, Yahoo, and their peers. In the long run, Wikia Search will "achieve better-quality search results by having human intervention and human oversight," he said.

Then he added a caveat that he's been repeating like a mantra lately: It would take at least two years of work for Wikia Search to get there.

It wasn't disclaimer enough. When Wikia Search was finally unveiled on Monday morning, there was an audible gasp from the Internet. The product was in terrible shape. The search engine was useless. Never mind the finer points of combing the Web for arcana; this thing couldn't find an elephant inside a Volkswagen Beetle. Punching in the search term "Wikipedia," for instance, brought up a handful of results on the first page, none of which happened to be the homepage of Wikipedia.

Soon, Wikia Search had put up a notice. "We are aware that the quality of the search results is low," it read, going on to explain that the whole idea was to let the community of users provide feedback and improve the index.

However, those user-feedback tools were no-shows as well. Clever schemes that would have bonded wiki-style collaboration and Google-style searching were as scarce as good search results.

There was no way to submit new links. In fact, as of Monday, the only working avenue for user involvement was to collaborate on a cute but peripheral feature: little mini-articles that appear after a search, giving a bite-sized overview of the subject at hand and maybe clearing up ambiguities ("Did you mean Paris Hilton or the Hilton in Paris?") before delving into the search results.

There is a built-in social network, but no indication what, if anything, it has to do with building a search engine. Beyond that, the search engine itself is open-source, meaning that propellorheads can join the programming effort, but that's a far cry from the layperson-friendly collaboration that made Wikipedia such a phenomenon.

Right now, the user-feedback centrepiece is users' ability to rate articles on a one-to-five star basis, thus helping Wikia rank results. On the day of the launch, however, clicking on the stars brought up a message: "Sorry, these don't actually do anything yet." The message was followed by a sad-face emoticon.

Instead of creating a liger, it began to seem more like Wikia Search was trying to cross a fish and an emu. The fishmu, in the annals of the animal kingdom, was never known for its synergy.

Every piece of software goes through a phase of being barely functional. What's most baffling about Wikia Search is that its creators chose to show it to the public in such a state. Why not wait until they had something real to show?

Unsurprisingly, the reception it received was swift and foul. By day's end, everyone was writing about how nobody liked Wikia Search. Michael Arrington, one of the Web's most-read reviewers of new websites, thundered that Wikia Search was "one of the biggest disappointments I've had the displeasure of reviewing."

Jimmy Wales was reading, too, and here's part of what he posted on that blog in response: "When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page 'Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.' On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What's this? There's nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!"

Indeed, they did. Wikipedia, much like Apple, benefited greatly from being perceived as an underdog, even after growing to become a competitor-crushing, world-straddling underdog. It defined itself as a community of amateurs, challenging the fogeys at Britannica, the universities and their quaint experts, and the closed-minded old media. The lesson stands: When drumming up online support and filling supporters with a sense of purpose, it helps to foster a certain sense of persecution.

So let it be said that, for an endeavour like Wikia Search, a poorly received launch might not be the worst thing in the world. It fits perfectly with the Wales narrative. Observers can take his cue and sagely ask, will Jimmy work his magic again? Faced with a world of naysayers, will he once again make good?

There are reasons to keep an eye on Wikia Search. If the missing feedback mechanisms fall into place, it could be useful indeed. Humans can still outpace machines when it comes to synthesizing breaking news in real time, and - as Wales points out - we're better at catching the spam websites that bedevil Google.

In the meantime, the project only benefits from low expectations. Wales already has his funding, his programmers and his army of devotees. He doesn't need to sell anything just yet.

And, thanks to his calamitous launch, he's the scrappy underdog once again. We'll see if Wikia Search amounts to anything.

My temptation, based on what we saw this week, was to predict failure. Jimmy Wales has got us right where he wants us.

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