Touted as the white knight that will bring Google to its knees, Wikia started the game early with plenty of rhetoric. Unfortunately the white knight is more like a page boy. Instead of a shield and sword, this knight comes armed with a rusty dagger. In its current form, Wikia can’t even slay the smallest of feral kittens let alone a behemoth like Google.

Two quotes to get the ball rolling. The firs one is from Michael Arrington from TechCrunch blog:

"[Wikia Search] one of the biggest disappointments I’ve had the displeasure of reviewing." He said Wikia was "barely a search engine at all," and added that "the search results are poor and thin" and "absolutely no one is going to use this to search the Web, until (and if) it is greatly improved."

Yeah that about sums it up for me too.

The second is from Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia:

Wikia Search is a "project to build a search engine, not a search engine. We’ve been telling everyone that constantly. I’m sorry Michael’s disappointed, but having said that, we didn’t build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases."

I have major bones to pick with this statement. If a new car was released we would expect it to get from point A to point B since that is the basic concept of transportation. For a search we would expect that if we entered say Grid Hosting we would get results. This is not a notion of slick releases, but the basic premise of searches in general.

And lets see what are the results for Grid Hosting… AddFreeStats.com (no grid there), GridDesign.com (not a grid hosting host), Private-grid.nl (spam "info" site), Grid-Support.ac.uk (national grid research and database site), and lastly Web Hosting Blog V2.0 New Edition (spam site with tons of popups that took me quite a bit of time to close out even with my popup blockers).

Call me crazy but a slick release would have been one with a search engine that looked wickedly awesome… search.wikia.com could hardly be called slick graphically wise.

However the basic foundation of a good search engine isn’t there either. This is a car without an engine and possibly without wheels.

I understand this is a beta test, but come on at least have a general framework in place for getting us to where we want to go… or at least the general area.

The mini articles are a good addition, but if this is to be run by the community, then give us the tools to do so. I want to see a rating system that is based on the keywords entered not on the Internet as a whole.

An example:

Say I was looking up Heath Ledger Batman and I found a site that shows the behind the scenes on Heath’s dramatic transformation from blond "heart throb" (not my words) to psychotic villain. I give it a 5 star rating cause its exactly what I want. Now lets say someone else types in Heath Ledger 10 things I hate about you. In most rating systems the Joker site I gave a 5 star rating to will be at the top. Which is unfortunate because the new search is obviously not looking or batman references.

Now if it was a rating system based on keywords themselves perhaps I add 5 star rating and give it a tag, Batman OR Joker AND Heath Ledger. Now when someone types in Heath Ledger Joker they get that site or if they type in  Batman Heath Ledger they get that site but if they typed in Heath Ledger they won’t.

This is the type of community searches I think would be most effective.

Also the search should just not be one column of sites. How about one column of sites, one column of blogs and wikis, and one column of periodical and newspaper searches. Or how about a direct link on the side to the Wikipedia entry with a brief summary.

There are a ton of things that could have been done with this. We are told that this is a project to build a search engine, but couldn’t they have started the process by asking people what they want, what they think a search engine should have, build that engine, add functionality, maybe even make it customizable and then let us take a look and start improving it?

Currently, Wikia is a blank slate and we are left with not the idea that we can make it better, but with the thought of "is it even worth improving."