Search

Wikia Search Launches

There has been a flurry of largely negative postings about the newly launched alpha of Wikia Search – Jimmy Wales’ human powered search engine. I’ve bookmarked quite a few at del.icio.us, which will pop up on this blog around midnight tonight.

Phil Bradley has a nice little summary though:

Results are fairly basic, with a title, summary, URL, cached version and some sort of rating. Here’s the one for the top ranking site relating to Web 2.0 – see if you can work out what it means! That is so going to keep the SEO bods intrigued. There’s also a star rating system, which you can click on, but you get a message saying that they don’t actually do anything yet. Please – either make them do something or take them away until they are ready to do something.

Seariki

searikiSeariki (a conflation of search and wiki) is a new China based search engine which provides a way of finding information in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia search itself can be slightly frustrating, in that if it can find an exact match for your search term, it takes you straight to it, rather than returning a list of potential results.

Seariki provides a very Google-esque interface, and returns lists of results just as you would expect. It also provides a directory approach using categories on the home page. It’s also possible toview cached previews of content by clicking the “scrape” button next to a result.

It’s a pretty useful addition to ways of finding information within Wikipedia. Interesting that there are Google ads down the side of the results – people are finding ways of monetising Wikipedia content even if Jimmy Wales refuses to.

Load more posts!