Google Wikipedia sex test
Sorry - I couldn’t resist the title. Those were the 4 most popular queries made at Wikia Search at the time of our pre-alpha launch in January.
Wikia Search relaunched today (see the press release). Our search team have made some amazing improvements since January. Not only does it “suck less” but it’s actually fun. Which isn’t something I usually find with search engines!
It’s unrecogniazble from the versions early in the year so do check it out again. And try clicking the header on any search results page for something unexpected…
Wikia
WikiChix
Freedom defined
Fajro said,
June 3, 2008 at 20:19
So… that’s why it didn’t work yesterday?
I was trying to show it to a friend… unsuccessfully. :P
Angela Beesley said,
June 3, 2008 at 21:53
Sorry about that Fajro! You must have caught it in the process of transition to the new version.
Nick J said,
June 10, 2008 at 3:31
It’s not bad at all. Good results for “Sydney”, “Wikimania”, and “iphone”.
So-so results initially for “world youth day”. Being able to rate results and add new pages to the results is very nice. However, I gave a page the minimum rating (1 out of 5), and it moved to the top and I’d expect it drop to the end or get removed… ah okay, I see, I should have said “delete” instead (I was thrown off because the rating is more prominent than the delete, but this is just a case of getting familiar with the UI). Mostly irrelevant top results for “world youth day 08″ (maybe it should know that “world youth day” is a subset of these results, and that some of the comments/ratings for that also apply to the more detailed search). Overall pretty interesting though, has strong network effects - i.e. more people use it, more valuable it becomes. Is the value-add data available publicly though (i.e. ratings, deleting irrelevant things from the search results, etc) ? Because that’s where most of the value is, but if part of the attraction for users is that it’s more open than Google, then that’s probably the most valuable part to make publicly available. Also if people click links, is that recorded (in the same way that Google record aggregate stats about which links people click, and I think they used to do it for roughly around 10% of clicks) ? That’s also part of the value-add information, and is perhaps almost as good as an explicit rating in terms of reordering the search results.
Angela Beesley said,
June 10, 2008 at 20:23
Hi Nick. Thanks for your feedback. The value-add data is available via a JSON api and we want to open up log access for people that want to do interesting things with it outside of the JSON. That should all be under an open content license.
We’re not currently clicking tracks, and it needs more discussion within the project before we do since it has privacy implications.