Wikia Search-It’s an Alpha Guys, Lighten Up
Posted by Kirk M on 08 Jan 2008 | Tagged as: IMHO
Wikia Search hit the streets yesterday to rave…well…massive criticisms actually with blogger’s and prominent news sites lambasting the poor thing before it even made 10 paces out of the starting gate. And after one whole single day for public testing too! Come on people, it’s and alpha, okay? The developers make the choice as whether to release the first draft to the public for the benefit of feedback, offer it up for as a “private whatever” for “by invite only” testers or let it bake until it’s beta 1 quality depending on their needs. So they decided to release as soon as they had a working alpha 1 build and why would they do that you ask? Because a large portion of what powers Wikia Search is going to be based on USER FEEDBACK! Everyone get that? So how are the developers supposed to get constructive public feedback if they don’t release it? By what I understand Wikia Search is being built from the ground up and part of that process is heavily based on receiving human type feedback right from the start instead of waiting until it’s too late and indexing and more mature algorithms are already in place.
For those that already realize this please ignore the previous bold type, for the others, lighten up already.
This fact that the current results of any given search query in the new engine is basically going to be lousy is made quite obvious in the rather small blurb that’s Wikia Search’s “About” page as you can see by the excerpts below:
Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.
We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..
Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.
And at the bottom there’s this…
This site, which we have been working on for a long time now, represents the first draft of the future of search.
Looks pretty plain and simple to me. The rest of the blurb isn’t much longer so there was obviously no attempt to hide what this first offering actually was inside of a long, drawn out, multi-paragraph, say nothing “About” page as sometimes happens with other more finished offerings that are rather awful upon first release.
Sure there’s been a lot of hype about this new search engine but then again there’s a lot of hype about any new product that comes out and rarely does any new product live up to it’s hyped up image, at least not in my experience. It’s been that way for years now so who the heck pays attention to hype nowadays? For me it’s always been a “Show me the money” thing and with Wikia Search it’s going to have at least one year under it’s belt before I’ll pronounce judgement on it.
If it works it works and if it fails it fails. The idea of a search engine that combines the usual (or unusual) algorithms and user feedback appeals to me for some reason. Probably because I’ve never been all that comfortable with having a vast array of servers thinking it knows what I’m looking for. I also like the idea of this being open source but that’s me. Why shouldn’t we have a Firefox of search engines?
Don’t get me wrong here, I depend on Google and very often Live Search in my daily research and I probably always will but in the meantime I’ve already joined the Wikia Search Community (and I’m not exactly what you might call a “social animal”) and I’m going to work on that feedback they’re calling for. Wonder how many other folks will stop complaining and start offering their experience and knowledge in this latest search engine endeavor? Time will indeed tell.
Technorati Tags: Wlkia Search,Jimmy Wales,Open source
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8 Comments »
on 08 Jan 2008 at 8:23 pm 1.Ruhi said …
Kirk,
I don’t think many people realize what’s meant by Alpha and Beta testing. They think that since the developers have made the software available to the public, it should work flawlessly. They don’t understand that this is NOT the final product.
Of course, there are other examples, like Orkut (from Google) that’s been in the Beta mode forever!
on 08 Jan 2008 at 8:26 pm 2.Ruhi said …
I just left a comment and I’m not sure if you received it because there was no notification!
Anyway, what I said was-
People don’t understand the meaning of Alpha and Beta testing. They feel that once the software has been made available to the public, it should work flawlessly. Most of them don’t know the concept of feedback. Of course, there are other tools like Orkut (From Google) that’s been in the Beta phase since ages.
on 08 Jan 2008 at 8:35 pm 3.Ruhi said …
Oops! Sorry for the duplicate comment.
Just a note here to say that I read your “ABout” page and love your blogging journey from blogger- wp.com- self host! The funniest bit is at the end, where you’ve put in pictures of all the 3 browsers (incl IE) and said that you’re not choosy.
And you have an awesome plug-ins page and I will be stealing some of those for sure. In fact, I’m tempted to make a plug-in page of my own.
on 09 Jan 2008 at 5:32 am 4.Cat said …
Triple comment? That’s a new one.
The one thing I’m not too sure about is what the point of yet another searchengine is. I mean I use Google as it’s so integrated with FF toolbar, gmail so I don’t consider usign another one. And what about all the other ones? Some people use nothing but the ‘Good Search engine’ which gives money to charity, some use Live search [too slow for me]; is there really space for yet another one?
I think the main thing that annoys me about Wikia is that, as far as I understand, it is build on the Wikipedia inbuild searchengine which is abysmal, doesn’t register things like spelling mistakes and is even picky with capitalisation.
So, no thanks from me.
And that’s in no way related to alpha/beta/whatever stage. Hell, I;m thinking Google products will be beta forever!
on 09 Jan 2008 at 6:44 am 5.Ruhi said …
Cat: Let’s not even talk about the fact if there is any more room. Look at the number of social networking and bookmarking sites we have! Do we need them? Of course not. Do we even need the internet?
I never even knew about it until 10 years back.
on 09 Jan 2008 at 5:32 pm 6.KirkM said …
Hi there!
What with my trip to the VA today and coming back to find out that my host was upgrading the server my site’s on, I finally get a chance to answer some comments here.
@Ruhi:
You know how people are. And remember how long Google kept Gmail in beta? In a private “by invite only” beta for that matter? I give Wikia Search 1 chance in 2. By the way, not to sure what you mean by “no notification”. And glad you like the about page. And the plugin page is generated by a…uh…plugin actually.
@Cat:
Realistically I have to agree with you. We don’t really need another search engine but that doesn’t mean I’m not curious to see how Wikia Search evolves and for how long. And yeah, Google’s always has stuff in beta. They’re also damn smart.
Do we need the Internet? Oh yeah! We need the Internet. Can you imagine how much crap those trouble making countries could cause and we wouldn’t know a thing about it until it was all over? And for some reason I just know I wouldn’t want to have to head to the local library to look up some trivial information they probably wouldn’t have anyway and even if they did, it would be guaranteed to be obsolete information. And let’s not forget about the fact we’d having to depend on the media and the idiot box for our news (ooogg!). Yup, we need the internet but like anything else, it can be used or abused and that comes from one idiot that hasn’t had any sort of cable, satellite or even an old style antennae hookup to his TV for well over ten years.
Feel free to disagree.
on 09 Jan 2008 at 6:29 pm 7.Ruhi said …
Hey Kirk,
Definitely we need the internet. That statement in my comment was more of a joke.
By “no notification”, I meant that- I couldn’t see my comment appear for at least a minute. Then I thought that it might be under moderation. But if it’s the latter, then we generally get some sort of a feedback saying so. I didn’t see anything on the screen; so I thought that my comment was lost.
I’m replying to the comment you left on my blog here- Unfortunately, I’m deleting that blog (in fact, I’ve already asked my web host to do it) because it’s taking too much of my time and I’m afraid, I should be concentrating on other things right now in my life.
So, I imported the last few comments to my WP.com blog (you can find the link in my name).
But I appreciate all your help and I’m happy about the fact that I gained another blog friend in the process.
Hope your trip worked out well.
Take care
on 09 Jan 2008 at 7:25 pm 8.KirkM said …
Hi Ruhi,
I get it, I get it…sometimes I’m slow that way.
And the long delay in posting a comment happens occasionally due to my blog being an add-on domain to my wife’s business standard type website which she maintains with MS Frontpage. Unfortunately WordPress and Frontpage tend to argue a lot. But Bluehost finally got around to upgrading the server our sites run on to all the newest stuff including PHP 5 so here’s hoping things will get a bit better.
On the trip, things look just a bit better…time will tell as always.
And I already left a comment on your WP.com blog.