People Search Digest

Wikia Search no longer sucks.

That’s straight from Jimmy Wales, its creator, who says that, up until now, Wikia Search “pretty much sucked” and “has not been usable on a day to day basis.” Such brazen honesty is refreshing in this industry, but it’s pointless unless the service improves. Wales insists that it has, rolling out a ton of new editing features that allows users the same kind of freedom they enjoy on Wikipedia. Searchers can remove, reorder, add, rate, annotate, and comment on search results at their leisure. Everyone else can do the same too, which should make for some epic editing wars. As with Wikipedia, the Wikia Search community can collectively ban spammers from editing results.

The new interface lets users drag results around the page in real time, and hovering over a result brings up an editing menu on the right. Users can also add new search results; simply paste in the URL in the “Add to this result” box, and the new page will appear in any subsequent search results.

If you “annotate” a result, a window with the actual web page will open up. From there, anything you click on or highlight from the page - images, text, links - will appear in the Wikia Search results. You can also add comments to the results and annotations. All additions can be rated and commented on, or even deleted by other users.

Wales is counting on the Wikia community to maintain content quality and make the results the absolute best they can be. If a community doesn’t support it, users may as well just use Google or Yahoo for their searches. Indeed, if users aren’t quite satisfied with Wikia results, they can click on the conveniently located Google and Yahoo icons for results from those engines.