Wikia Wikia!

Announced this week from every possible source (I saw it first on Adotas), Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has created a new community-developed search engine, Wikia. The cute and cuddly sounding Wikia is basing itself on four founding principles including:

• Transparency – Wikia plans to open up their algorithms and system operations
• Community – Everyone is able to contribute socially in the community atmosphere
• Quality – Only highly relevant and accurate search results will appear and Wikia will help to improve the overall searching experience
• Privacy – Wikia does not store or transmit personal and identifying data

All four principles are important, but isn’t this what most Web sites claim: To never give out personal information and to have relevant and accurate information? I myself do not check privacy policies on Web sites a majority of the time, mainly because they are so long and in lawyer lingo. So what exactly sets Wikia apart from the million other sites? I believe it’s the collaboration in rankings from open-source search protocols and human editing. Simply put, it is the joining together of Wikipedia and Google. Actually, instead of Google, Wikia recently acquired the web crawler Grub, the original visionary for the project. I think it will be really interesting to see if Wikia takes off and becomes widely popular. For me, I see it right now as a huge industry announcement that will fizzle and die in about 6 months. There is simply too much competition for people to remember all the cool and interesting sites that are out there on the Web. They really have differentiated themselves from the competition, so I do hope it lives and thrives with user input and generates more relevant and useful information than other strictly algorithm search engines. I’ll have to monitor this for the coming months, after it officially launches at the end of the year, and report back. Wikia!

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