Wikia Search Alpha Launches
Posted: January 10th, 2008
On Monday, the creators of the free-content encyclopedia Wikipedia launched the alpha version of their search engine, Wikia.
At first glance, Wikia’s homepage looks very much like Google’s homepage, from the white space and clean uncluttered search box to the personal login features on the top right side.
Admittedly, Wikia is still in its alpha phase and has a long way to go before becoming a major contender in the search engine field, and “are aware that the quality of the search results is low.”
Further reading about Wikia Search reveals that their four organizing principles include: transparency; community; quality and; privacy. That first principle, transparency, raises some eyebrows. It defines transparency as, “openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.”
If the algorithm and ranking procedures of this search engine are “transparent”, then wouldn’t that make search engine optimization ridiculously easy and encourage exploitation from black-hat SEOs? These alpha search results might pale in comparison to what a full-blown “transparent” search engine would produce.
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